CHAPTER ELEVEN
ZARA
When Axel rises off the bench, I’m not sure what comes over me. I dash toward him, white-knuckling my last vestige of sanity. He’s unsurprised. In fact, he appears bored. Until I’m shoving his solid, damp chest. Then his sapphires smolder with the cravings he denies.
That only fuels my ire. “You’re trapping me here?”
He doesn’t respond in words. Instead, he manages to spin me so my back is flush with his chest, and he fastens his arm over my collarbone.
In one fluid motion—clutching his forearm, turning my head to the side so he can’t choke me, lowering my stance, and sliding my body behind his so I can grab his knees—I knock him to the ground.
He emits a groan that lands somewhere between a grunt and a chuckle before barking an order. “Leave us.”
Maddox tsks. “You’re going to pay for that, Papa Axe—making me miss the show. Looks like Slugger will make it hurt enough though.”
Before Maddox utters the final word and the door clicks shut, Axel swipes my feet out from under me so I fall onto his chest, and he rolls us to obtain the dominant position.
“Stop,” he demands, hovering over me.
I don’t. Not yet.
I arch my back, use my knee to apply enough pressure to his groin that he has to squirm to thwart it, hook my other leg around him for leverage, and invert us so I end up on top.
“Zara,” he growls in his authoritative tenor that speaks to a host of deeper desires inside me, “that’s enough.”
In a blink, he seizes control, flipping us so he looms above me. His shins are pinning my calves to the floor, his knees flanking my thighs with force, and he’s clutching my shoulders, his thumbs brushing the feverish flesh on my neck.
I could flip him again, or I could fold my arms over his elbows and press down on them until he was forced to let go so they didn’t break.
Part of me wants to keep fighting because I’m so riled up, but it won’t lead to anything productive.
And soaking him in for a beat seems like a worthwhile consolation prize.
His chest is heaving, and I’d wager that it’s not from the exertion. His stormy eyes are ripe with hunger and adorned by a fan of thick lashes that are a crime against women. There’s a substantial bulge poking my thighs that isn’t my pistol.
And even in the humid gymnasium, he smells like the season’s first snow. The crisp fragrance of a chill before the sting.
“You’re holding me prisoner?”
“I’m doing exactly as I promised,” he says in his even-keeled, never-overly-ruffled lilt. “I warned you that you’d be answering to me if you returned, and here you are.”
“Meaning I never leave?” I grit out, warring with my urge to send his nuts into his throat. “Until when?”
“As long as it’s necessary.”
I dig my nails into his biceps, heeding the taut skin and sculpted muscle, but it isn’t enough to make him flinch. “What the hell does that mean?”
“You tell me,” he counters cooly, as if this were business as usual, just another wrestling match.
“Your cover is blown. You may have survived that by leaving when we were on the Riverwalk, but it’s doubtful you will now.
Any eyes on you saw you with me that day.
They saw the control I had, the spectacle I made.
And they saw me getting in my limo and you choosing to return with me.
This is the safe haven for the entire underworld.
No matter what the mission is, the stakes are high.
What happens to agents who blow a job of this caliber? ”
My heart thunders against my sternum as the veracity of that statement sinks its burs into me.
It already dawned on me during my conversation with Tripp that abandoning this mission wasn’t an option, but I guess I didn’t consider the danger of simply leaving the grounds of the one place where people in my world would be too afraid to strike.
Tripp did though. He told me there were eyes everywhere.
A memory of what happens when things go sideways with a job smacks me in the face.
My closest friend, Jerry, was supposed to be back five hours ago. There’s a pit in my stomach. Why hasn’t he checked in? Why is no one else in the whole damn camp talking about it?
There’s a whisper inside me that insists the worst, but it can’t be right.
He’s only twenty-five—four years older than me.
He’s been an apprentice at our camp for three years, after a short stint in the military.
He was uptight at first, but then he loosened up with Tripp, me, and a few other younger students here. We’ve all been inseparable for years.
I sprint toward the martial arts building, busting inside so aggressively that it disrupts the demonstration. Several of the mentees smirk or chuckle at my arrival, but my father sighs.
He’s in warrior mode, taking on everyone in the class. No one ever beats him on the mats or in our simulations, even though he’s in his forties. He’s always stronger, smarter, and faster.
I should be dressed, participating, but I can’t shake this feeling that something’s off.
When I rush toward him, he knocks the guy on his ass and tells him to take five.
“Jerry isn’t back yet,” I spit out.
His eyes are empathetic, but like he often does, he steels his jaw. “He’s not coming back, Zara.”
“No,” I gasp, fisting his gi as tears instantly stream down my cheeks. “What are you …”
His Adam’s apple bobs, and he clears his throat. “He botched the job, had to be replaced, and knew too much, so …”
“So, what?” I shriek in a voice that sounds nothing like my own, the force weakening my knees until I’m huddled on the mat in a pathetic plea. “You didn’t fight for him?”
He stoops before me, rubbing my arm. “That’s the job. It’s what being an assassin means. You know this.”
“Not Jerry.” A sob racks through my chest, a wail so alarming that I hear sniffs from a few of our ladies, which is almost unheard of. “We all loved him. He was family.”
“He was.” He drags me into a hug, squeezing me tight. “But this was the life he chose.”
I sit with that for a minute, wrestling with all that it means while also battling this overwhelming hollowness and grief. “So, if it were me who botched a job, what would that mean to you? To Tripp?”
“You know we’d always fight for you, like we already have. We’ll always do whatever is necessary to ensure you’re safe.” His tone is soothing, but because my father is unwavering in his vow to be forthright with people, he tacks on, “But I told you not to choose this life, angel.”
The recollection dissipates, sinking into my gut like a lead balloon, so I narrow my burning eyes. “You don’t even know why I’m here. Everything you have on me is based on absurd assumptions.”
“Perhaps,” he agrees, dusting his thumb over my battering pulse point. “But you haven’t revealed anything to combat my assumptions. You’ve avoided me since I called you out. And you still haven’t given me your word that you won’t be the face my family sees in their nightmares.”
I should tell him that I already swore to Tripp that I wouldn’t become any of their nightmares, but maybe not divulging everything until I understand this guy’s angle is a better bet.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” I argue, though it’s weak.
We had a brief exchange, in a manner that wouldn’t make sense to most. I was flipping through a well-worn copy of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest from a library here for the members when I saw a line worth highlighting: The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
I left it for him on his conference room table before a meeting.
That was my way of telling him that just because I’d arrived at a suspicious time, it didn’t render me guilty. I wasn’t sure if he’d see it or if he’d know it was me.
But then he left Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter on my desk with a passage highlighted: No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.
It certainly fit, but his message wasn’t entirely clear. Maybe he was issuing a censure, or maybe he was offering freedom. Every interaction with him has me in knots.
Including this one.
“I’ve been waiting.” There’s a genuineness to his delivery that stains this exchange with intimacy, far from the iciness we’re so inept at feigning.
My breath catches in my throat, parts of me that weren’t engaged in the grappling tingling from neglect. “Waiting for what?”
He studies me for a never-ending minute, his face devoid of emotion, but his eyes teeming with conflict, until he finally arrives at a conclusion he’s willing to share. “For you to trust me.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Are you done fighting?” he asks like he’s speaking to a petulant child, slowly releasing his hold on my shoulders.
Not ready for him to get up, I wriggle as though I’m going to flip him.
It’s just enough to provoke him to gather my wrists and secure them above my head.
Again, I could free myself. But I have a hunch that ensnaring Axel in this position—with a woman he deems too young and an enemy, but clearly wants—is the ultimate torture.
“You need to be done,” he commands, and the gruffness of it scrapes over me like the rough hemp of a rope, braided with strands of his bridled libido.
“I’ll ask again.” I buck against his constraint, prodding every inch of him. “Why would I trust you?”
He leans down, his chest pressing into mine and his scruff grazing my cheek to incite a full-body shiver as his lips tickle my earlobe. “Because I didn’t kill you, my darling Thorn. I kept you.”
Thorn. On one hand, I’m insulted by the insinuation that all I am is a thorn in his side when I could be a dagger to the chest. But on the other hand, he has a point. He kept me, which almost sounds sweet.
Leaving me breathing and letting me return with him does offer a seed of trust. The fact that he didn’t neutralize me when he suspected I might be a traitor could be enough to get him killed by KORT.
I’m not familiar with their inner workings, but they are known for the importance they place on loyalty.
There’s some foreign part of me that longs to melt into him, to assure him I understand that he stuck his neck out for me, though I don’t have any idea why.
But then I’m reminded that my mother died by—I’m guessing—his father’s hands.
That Axel vowed to end me himself just a few days ago.
That people like me don’t have the luxury of indulging in some far-fetched romantic fairy tale.
Attachments are liabilities. But in relation to that, maybe it pisses me off a tad that he views me as too young, rather than as a peer.
So, I go with a response that is sure to irk him—or at the very least, make him face his regrettable desires.
“Ahh. That’s true. So, since I’m right here, beneath you, you have choices.” I swivel my hips with a prelude to his options. “You could fuck me, or I could kill you.”
He laughs at that. Laughs. It’s deep and husky, and it shoots straight to my throbbing clit. “So, if I fuck you,” he rasps, his lips less than an inch from mine and his dick jerking against my abs, “you won’t kill me?”
We’re so close, so connected; I can taste the lust in his words, feel the taunt buzzing between us.
That’s a go sign. Since he’s completely locked into this moment, I free my legs, drive myself upward, using his grip on my wrists to afford me leverage, and overturn him so I’m straddling his pelvic area.
His hands float to my hips, and every cell of my body thrums with a thrill from his warmth. Based on his wolfish expression, I think we’re both consumed with another scenario that this position could work for, but this is nothing more than a tease.
“I didn’t say that, Papa Axe.” I draw out the sweet moniker Maddox used with a trace of seduction, rock my hips once to torture him, and push off his erection—he’s certainly not lacking in that department.
Everything about this man is larger than life.
As I stand, I wonder if my own arousal is as obvious. My panties are drenched, far more than I’ve ever experienced. But my fury is greater too.
Once I’m towering over him, I bite my lip, rake my gaze down to his tented crotch, and strut away, calling over my shoulder, “Still might be something to think about. You’d die a lot happier, and I’d walk away satisfied. On all accounts.”