Chapter 5
Darius drew his side arm and shielded me immediately, while all I could think was that I was about to be kidnapped, again, or murdered and I was wearing sweats with the word ‘juicy’ across my ass.
When the door handle shook, Darius leveled his weapon at the door and I held my breath.
“Wait,” Angelica said, “I think—”
The door opened and in strolled a beautiful Korean man with glowing blue eyes and tattoos on his hands and forearms. Honest-to-God scales suddenly bloomed across his face and down his throat, as his dark hair disappeared leaving his head covered in gold and blue scales as well.
“Jesus, Trey!” Angelica said, smacking him on the arm. “You almost got your head shot off.”
“Not likely,” he said with a grin that showed off sharp incisors, “Dragon hide is not easy to penetrate.”
“What’s the situation?” Darius asked, lowering his weapon.
“Two teams, mostly Orcs with scoped rifles,” he said. “We’ll have to separate. Here’s a burner, it’s got my number in it, call us when you get to safety. You’ve got transportation?”
Darius took the small phone from the man…Dragon, whatever.
“Yes. Do you have a plan for after?”
“We do, and I’ll brief you when we’re all safe,” Angelica said.
Darius pulled a bag from the closet and tossed me a black hoodie and tennis shoes. I pulled them on without question and then took a medium sized sling bag from him.
“There’s money in there and keys to a green Toyota van parked on the corner of 3rd and Blaine, north from us. If we get separated, you head there. Hide on the floor of the back. Understand?”
I nodded firmly, though my hands shook with terror.
“We’ll buy you some time,” Angelica said. “There’s a maintenance closet at the end of the east side of this floor. You know where?”
Darius nodded.
“Inside is a secret door that leads to a passageway. Follow it all the way down and it will end at a door that leads out of the east side of the building.”
“Got it,” Darius confirmed as he strapped another gun to his belt and a then put another sling bag on his shoulders.
“Good luck,” Angelica said before she and Trey ran out of the room.
Darius slipped in front of me and I stood behind him, exactly how we’d practiced hundreds of times when he’d guarded me. I heard gunfire and more yelling. Darius signaled for me to follow him and as I stepped out into the hall, I could feel the blood that had been shed. It filled my senses, coppery and thick, and I tried desperately not to gag. When I stumbled, Darius looked back and grasped my forearm.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, keep going.”
“Nina—”
“Walk, Darius. Please.”
He looked pissed, but turned around and did what I asked. It was a sign of the change in our relationship since he’d found me because the old Darius would’ve thrown me over his shoulder and started to run.
My room was the last room at the end of a long hallway, giving us some measure of privacy. When we got to the other end, Darius darted to the left and I followed, only to be brought up short by shouts and the ping of bullets. Darius pulled me to him and bolted back around the corner. While I wanted to be held tight to his chest, enormous arms encasing me in warmth, this was not the situation that I’d had in mind.
“We can’t get out” I said.
“Stay back here,” he said and went to take a look.
More bullets hit the wall when Darius looked around the corner. When the shots stopped, he leaned around and fired.
Back and forth this went on and it was clear we were at a stalemate. They could wait until Darius ran out of bullets, which, knowing him, would be a while. Or they’d simply rush in and overwhelm us.
My heart was pounding in my ears and I was seconds from panic dragging me down into a bottomless pit. Darius wouldn’t be able to handle that and fight these Orcs. We’d both die if I didn’t find a way to move past this.
Please…I don’t know if you can hear me Morrigan, but please, help me.
More bullets peppered the wall, shredding the plaster. One of them hit Darius in shoulder and he flew back against the wall with a scream.
“Darius!”
“Stay back!”
He was bleeding and it called to me, promising to reveal secrets that I’d wanted answers to for so long. But that was a line I didn’t want to cross with Darius, not ever. He took a breath and the determination on his face was a fearsome thing to see. When he fired this time, I could feel the pain of one of the attackers. I focused on those sensations, letting them flood my mind, and pushed away the alarm of the situation and Darius’ wound.
And it worked.
The darkness, soft as velvet and seductive, poured through me and it was as if I had a second set of eyes. I could see the heartbeat of the attackers, of Darius, of me. I knew how many there were, I knew that the injured one had volunteered because he wanted to die. I knew that there was another one bleeding who was enjoying himself.
My body propelled itself forward without a hint of the terror I’d been drowning in before. I felt invincible, curious about the battle a mere few feet away.
Darius seized my wrist as I went by him and forced me to skid to a stop.
“What’s going on? Are you alright?”
“Let me go,” I said, my voice changing to a deeper tone as I let more of the Morrigan’s power mix with my own.
He heard it, of course he did, and his grip tightened.
“No,” his voice rasped with an intensity that had nothing to do with the bullet wound. “I won’t…I won’t lose you again.”
There was the barest hint of something possessive in his voice, and I thrilled at hearing it. But this was not the time let myself daydream about what it could mean.
“Darius,” I reached up and cupped his cheek, “let me go.”
With a deep breath, I let more of the Morrigan in. I knew instinctively that I couldn’t just let it take over. I had to be a willing participant in this. So I made a decision just before I dashed around the corner, that whatever happened, whatever I did, I would make sure that Darius got out of here and I’d deal with the consequences later.
My eyes were hindered by the dimness of the lights, but the eyesight the Morrigan was giving me made it a moot point. I could see their hearts beating in their chests, see the flow of the blood through their veins. I let it guide me and I struck out with the power, letting it flow through my fingertips.
I found each piece of metal on the ground, every ejected round, each small knife. It was, perhaps, a bit of over kill, but it was so easy to manipulate them, like simply turning on a faucet.
I took the knives off the males quite easily and they weren’t fast enough to grab them back. The ones that had the ability to fire their guns were sorely disappointed when the bullets stopped and turned back toward them.
That would’ve been enough, but the Morrigan demanded more.
So trailing the bullets in their deadly path through the bodies of the attackers, the knives sliced clean through every single throat. The blood flowed and splattered, and I saw their lives.
Violent and short.
Some reveled in it.
Others mourned their choices.
I saw their kills, their mistakes in battle, what it cost them. For some it wasn’t much, their souls were already dark and I had to stare into that abyss until I wanted to scream.
Others were burdened with guilt so overwhelming that it was crushing me.
I longed for quiet, for peace as I stood there, sobbing.
And then, I felt the Morrigan’s cold fingers against my skin, soothing, taking the pain away.
The blood’s influence on me faded until there was nothing but the sense of the souls drifting under my feet as they faded. In the center of it all was a dark whisper. I got the feeling that it longed to sooth their transition, like a mother taking care of her children. And I couldn’t help but let a tear fall at the thought that they were bereft of its comfort.
“Nina!” Darius bellowed behind me.
His hard grip on my shoulders as he turned me around was like the breaking of glass in a perfectly quiet room. It had been loud in my head, crowded, but somehow also peaceful. But now, the silence was oppressive, a yawning emptiness that overwhelmed me.
No more heartbeats except for mine and Darius.
No more gunfire.
No more adversaries.
And then, I saw the bodies.
“Oh my God…I-I…I did that.”
I was sobbing now, unable to control the rush of emotion. I was no longer distant from my actions; it was all here in front of me and I couldn’t escape what I’d done. Even though I couldn’t see the faces of our attackers through their tactical masks, I knew each of them because their blood had shown me who they were.
“Nina, look at me,” Darius said, hands now on my face.
I whimpered and did as he asked. His eyes were red and familiar, an anchor in this storm.
“I don’t…I don’t want to…feel this,” I sobbed.
“I know, but you’re strong enough for this. Push through it, you can do this.”
“No…I can’t.”
“You don’t have a choice. It’s hard but you have to do it. So do it, Nina.”
There was no training for this, nothing I knew that could just push these things out of me. I still remembered what I’d pulled from Angelica, so it wasn’t as if I could actually get rid of it all forever. But this paralyzing emotion, the uncontrollable sobbing and screaming, that I did need to control at the very least.
So I tried to look inward, to find that power again. Instead of velvet and dark beauty, it was an oily presence full of rot and pain. That was what needed purging, so I tried to grab hold of it.
Several times it was like grasping smoke, but just when I was about to give up and just collapse, I managed to find a tendril of it. I yanked and pulled and suddenly my stomach was heaving.
I threw up bile that was an unnatural shade of black. It just kept coming, purging my system of what the emotions the Morrigan had ingested.
When it was done, my legs shaking as I leaned against the wall, Darius started to pick me up and I shied away.
“No…you’re bleeding, I don’t want to…”
He gave me a short nod.
“Right…yes. Thank you,” he searched my eyes, probably looking for any signs of it. “Can you walk? We need to get out of here.”
I glanced down and there wasn’t much of the linoleum that wasn’t covered with blood. But as long as it didn’t touch my skin I should be alright.
“Yeah, I can walk.”
I focused on not looking down as we wound our way through the tangled mess of the bodies. The smell of blood was terribly familiar, not from the Morrigan but from a memory and I wondered if I’d seen and smelled it in the labs.
The bodies…I killed them…I didn’t even care. We have to get this out of me, before there’s nothing left.
Darius grasped my arm and guided me quickly down the hallway until we found the end where the maintenance closet was. Even though his eyes kept skating over to me, he didn’t ask me if I was okay, and he didn’t treat me like I was fragile. Though, I knew if I needed him he’d be there. It was comforting, to know that he believed I could stand on my own two feet right now when the world felt like it was crumbling around me.
But then, Darius had always been the one that had believed in me, that had seen me as something more than the shallow person everyone expected me to be.
When he got the door open, we stepped inside and it was nearly pitch black. The only light was from under the door and it was weak, barely providing enough for me to not step on the mop in front of me.
I had expected Darius to find the panel and get us out of here immediately, but he stood there, hand braced on the wall, while he leaned with his head down, breathing slowly. For some reason, this made a new, horrifying thought hit me.
“Oh my God,” I gasped, “were those…did you know them? I killed your friends, didn’t I?”
Darius spun around and looked like he wanted to hold me and stopped himself, grasping my forearms instead and looking down at me.
“No, that’s not it. Breathe, Nina, it’s okay.”
“It’s not okay!” I clapped a hand over my mouth. “I-I killed them! Without a second thought and it felt…it felt right. Like it was my purpose, my right.”
“That’s the Morrigan, that’s not you.”
“I know that, but it doesn’t make it any less frightening. What…what happens if we can’t—”
“Stop,” his voice, tinged with panic, was also firm, strong, “I won’t let that happen. I swear to you, whatever I have to do, you are surviving this, you hear me? You are stronger than this, Nina, and you will fight it and win.”
The Morrigan was a fucking goddess and yet Darius believed I could beat it?
It made me laugh through my tears and shake my head.
“What?” he asked.
“You always did have too high an opinion of me.”
“Or maybe you didn’t have a high enough opinion.”
He reached up and with a gentleness that belied his huge size and strength, brushed some curls out of my face. His fingers tips grazed my cheek and I shivered.
“I’m scared,” I whispered.
“I know, you’d be stupid not to be. But you survived that place, what they did to you. You survived your father and all the bullshit he put you through. You’ll get through this too. And I’ll be there, every minute. I’ll never leave you again.”
My mouth became dry. When had he gotten so close?
“Promise?”
My neck was craned upward as he leaned forward, our noses almost touching, and I couldn’t think. We should’ve been fleeing, running for our lives, and instead all I wanted to do was play a little seven minutes in heaven with the male that had occupied every filthy fantasy for years.
“I promise.”
His lips were so close that I felt the warmth of his breath like a phantom kiss on my mouth.
I swore he was about to kiss me. His eyes were locked on my mouth and one of his hands had traveled down to cup my hip, while one of mine was on his shirt, careful not to be anywhere near the wound on his shoulder.
Wound…he’s hurt.
“We should go,” I said, taking a tiny step back. “You’re hurt and we—”
“…need to get out of here,” he stood up straight, the brief openness in his gaze gone now.
Darius turned away from me and I felt the lack of his heat and presence. Even when he was barely touching me, just his closeness was a welcoming weight around me. He said he’d never leave me, but did that only apply to now, or was it truly forever?
A question for another day.
He found the panel fairly quickly and slid it open, cold light filtering in from the door. He peeked his head out to make sure it was safe and then motioned for me to follow. We stepped out into a damp passage, surrounded by concrete on all sides. The only sounds were our footsteps, and the drip of water from somewhere. Bare bulbs illuminated everything just enough to make it creepy. Darius led the way, all business, as if he hadn’t almost kissed me a minute ago, as if I hadn’t slaughtered half a dozen Orcs with these new powers.
I wished I could learn how he did that, compartmentalize and forget what he was feeling in a second.
The passageway sloped down gradually and was slick, causing me to lose my footing several times, so that Darius had to reach out and steady me. The chill seeped into my bones quickly, and by the time we got to a heavy door at the end, I was shivering.
Darius typed in a code and the lock of the door clicked loudly off the concrete walls.
Once again, he looked out first and then motioned me to follow him. The exit was half hidden by large flowering bushes, and a tree whose branches had started to grow toward the door. From the outside it looked like old and rusted, something that was likely sealed shut and not used. There wasn’t even a door handle.
Darius had me stop for a moment while he stepped out from the bushes and looked around. The street lights were far off, their golden light not yet reaching this area, so there were deep shadows hiding me.
He had his glamour up now since we were outside of the hospital. It was always a little jarring for me, though there were a number similarities between his true Orc form and his glamour.
He was still enormous, especially for a Human, but instead of his green skin, he was a darker color, like he’d spent time in the sun. His head was still shaved and the shape of his face was still pretty much the same, with a light dusting of stubble around his full lips. His eyes were hazel now instead of red, and the glamour took six inches and fifty pounds off his frame because most Humans were nowhere near as big as he was in his true Orc form. The tattoos remained, for which I was glad; they’d always added an air of menace and mystery to him.
He motioned for me to follow after a few minutes and I darted out from the foliage. I was grateful that the sweatshirt he’d selected for me was dark, since it hid a lot of the blood. I pulled the hood up and then put my arm around Darius’ waist. Without missing a beat, he put his arm around my shoulders to make us look like the most mismatched couple on the planet, with my head only coming to his arm pit. The few people that we passed either didn’t bother to look at us or only gave us a quick glance before going back to their conversations.
“We’re almost to the car,” he said to me.
I nodded, relieved. But the next moment, tires screeched and I jumped. Darius stopped and we heard the unmistakable slap of heavy shoes on cement. He looked around for cover but there was nothing. Not a hedge, not a car big enough to really hide him. His eyes met mine, jaw tensing with determination and I knew that he was about to do something stupid, like sacrifice himself for me.
So I pushed him against a nearby truck, relieved when no alarm went off.
“Kiss me,” I said.
“What?” he gasped, like I”d just suggested we do the hokey pokey down the fucking street.
“It’s like Black Widow said, public displays of affection make people uncomfortable. Kiss me!”
He looked up and then back down, clearly panicking.
“God damn it, Darius, I don’t have cooties!”
I pulled on his shirt front and went up on my tip toes.
“Nina—”
A second before my lips met his, I thought, this is about survival, pure and simple. His mouth didn’t move for the first second or two, which was okay. This was supposed to be fake, right? But then I was breathing the same air he was, and his lips were softer than I”d thought they”d be, and the scrape of his stubble felt so damn naughty on my skin.
I let out a small, soft sigh because in spite of the circumstances, I”d thought of kissing this huge Orc from the first day I”d laid on him. Even if this was his glamour and not his true form, it was still the fulfilment of a fantasy.
My little, inconsequential sound was a match to a fuse and I welcomed the burn. One second I was wondering if Darius was grossed out, the next, he was kissing me hard and thorough.
He sucked my bottom lip into his mouth and bit me just a little before soothing it with his insistent lips. When I gasped, half in shock, half in longing, his tongue filled my mouth, taking complete control and dragging tiny moans out of me.
Being kissed by Darius was like being consumed. He didn’t just kiss me, he was dominating me, savoring every thrust of his tongue in my mouth, every nip of his teeth on my lips. I’d never been kissed like this before, as if he’d been starved for his whole life and now he was feasting.
On me.
Darius’ hands went to my waist and he yanked me against him, one hand reached around to my ass and he grabbed an entire handful of cheek. The other gripped my hip so hard that, in the back of my mind, I hoped I’d have a bruise to remember this by.
My fingers went to the back of his neck, digging into the flesh there, and when I scratched him, Darius growled in response. His giant hands held me tight against his pelvis, where his hard dick was waking up my body to sensations I hadn’t felt in over a year. I ground myself against him, completely out of control now, as fire coursed through my blood. Was it possible to be the horniest of my entire life while armed men were looking for me so they could put a bullet in my brain?
Apparently it was.
“Darius,” I moaned against his mouth.
“Fuck…”
His voice was whiskey with a shot of pure sin and it made my knees weak.
The next thing I knew, he’d flipped me around so that my back was to the truck. On instinct I opened my legs so he could step between them, and when he bent his knees so his cock rubbed just right against my center, I let out a filthy moan that Darius promptly devoured. I couldn”t breathe except when he gave me air, I couldn’t think about anythingexcept where our bodies met. When his hips thrust up against me, as he pressed my back against the truck, I lost the capacity for speech. The only thing I could do was meet him, grind for grind, gasp for gasp. I was so lost in the experience of Darius dry humping me that I wasn’t being careful where my hands roamed.
When I made contact with his wound, my mind was assaulted with a rush of images and feelings.
Him, lost in the animal fury of his berserker instincts, the fury overwhelming every single other thought or feeling.
Screams and blood.
The grief of losing family and friends.
A child crying and then a grown man, both of them Darius.
Guilt so all-consuming that I wanted to die.
Regret that choked the joy in me.
A self-imposed isolation that froze my heart.
I started to weep, my body shaking but for a different reason now.
And then I saw something different. A glimmer of light along the edge of all this darkness. It was fragile, but beautiful and warm.
It was me, every moment we’d shared through the years, every time I’d smiled at him, touched him, gave him shit for this or that. All our nights watching Jeopardy and eating junk food, or sitting in silence while he read and I did a puzzle. It was all there, a wall separating it from the horror of his past, as if he were trying to keep it pure and safe from himself.
I gasped in shock, even as I wept for the pain he’d lived in for so long. But Darius misunderstood my reaction and pulled back with horror on his face as if he’d done something wrong.
“Nina…shit, I’m sorry…”
I shook my head, wanting to tell him it wasn’t anything he’d done, but also unable to find the words. Everything was confusing and overwhelming in my head. The good and the bad, his pain and his desires. It was like being locked in a room with dozens of different TV shows blaring at once.
I needed to get away from him, to get some air. In the back of my mind I wondered if being pressed up against him after touching his blood was making it worse. Whatever the reason, I was starting to feel like I couldn’t breathe, while I also wished I could stay in his arms all night.
He let me go and I couldn’t even look him in the eyes. Not because I was disgusted by anything I saw. Far from it. He carried so much pain inside of him, and while it might be a burden he was used to, I wasn’t. And I was getting his entire lifetime, all at once.
I staggered away onto the lawn of the house in front of us and threw up the same dark bile until I was trembling, clutching handfuls off grass.
Darius stood behind me but didn’t touch me. I could feel the self-recrimination coming off him in waves.
“Stop it,” I gritted out, forcing myself to my feet. “It wasn’t the kiss, it was…”
“I know what it was.”
When I turned around, it was dizzying how much he’d changed so fast.
A few moments ago, he was a furnace of passion and desire, his every touch filled with so much lust that it had swept me away, despite the danger around us.
And now he was shut down, maybe more than I’d seen him since he first started working for me nine years ago. Cold didn’t even begin to describe his eyes as he stared at me, and the stoic expression he usually wore was bordering on loathing.
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to steady the shaking in my limbs and the roiling of my stomach. “It was an accident.”
“Because you forced a kiss.”
I gaped at him.
“Forced? It was a diversion and it worked. You didn’t have to be so enthusiastic about it if kissing me was such a terrible thing!”
“Keep your fucking voice down,” he said looking around. “We need to leave. Now.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I marched past him to the sidewalk and he yanked me back.
“You just going to walk out there and get shot?”
“No, I’m not stupid.”
He looked around the corner of the truck and then a little further down the street. Finally, he signaled to me to follow him with a huffed out sigh.
“There’s a car parked a few feet down the street that wasn’t there before and has two people in it.”
“Okay, so what now? We stay here and glare at one another?”
Darius looked thunderous and swore under his breath.
“We’ll cut down a block and skirt around this street. But no more—”
“Yeah, I got it. Kissing gross,” my voice was far more bitter than I’d intended.
But if he caught it, and cared at all, Darius didn’t show it. I followed him closely as instructed. Just as we were nearing what I assumed was the car, a dark figure suddenly appeared out of the shadows and tackled Darius to the ground.
He let out a yell, and I could hear the pain in his voice as he landed on his shoulder. I didn’t scream, though it rolled up my throat, as the knife in the attacker’s hand went for Darius’ throat. Darius stopped him, but I could tell his bullet wound was making it difficult.
I wasn’t about to stand there and do nothing, so I kicked the man in the side, right above his hip.
A fighter I was not, which was why I stood there and gave the guy an opening to lash out with the knife and slice into my thigh. I did scream then, and Darius roared in fury.
I’d never really seen Darius let someone have it in real life.
Sure, he’d roughed up a few guys that had gotten handsy in bars, and there was one ex that did not take the break up well. But that was child’s play compared to this scenario.
His eyes glowed like two embers in his face as a terrible, spine-chilling growl erupted from his throat.
Darius seized the man’s wrist as it came down, and twisted sharply, and I heard the snap of bones and ligaments. Darius seized the howling man by the throat and lifted him off his body like the attacker weighed no more than a doll.
Spittle flew out of his mouth as he lifted the man higher. The man scratched at Darius’ fingers, trying to pry them off, but it was no use. I should have said something, told Darius to stop, but I was too shocked. Unfolding right before my eyes was exactly what I’d seen when I touched his blood.
This was what I’d seen in those memories, his berserker side.
He squeezed tighter, the man’s face turning purple, and that finally snapped me out of it.
“Darius, stop!”
I hit his arm and screamed at him.
“Stop it now!”
Darius paused and looked down at me. It was him, but more. More vicious, more beastly. It should’ve scared me, but it didn’t.
“Put him down,” I said, keeping my voice even.
His upper lip curled and he growled again.
“Darius, now. You have to keep me safe, remember? So we have to leave.”
That got through the haze, and his eyes started to get dimmer and dimmer, until the glow was gone and he lowered the man to the ground. By now he was unconscious, but I could sense his heart beating, albeit irregularly, and I was relieved.
When I looked back up at Darius, he was staring at the man, his expression unreadable.
“Hey,” I said, touching his arm, “let’s go.”
He nodded and as I stepped to the car, the knife wound stung. I winced and without another word, Darius scooped me up and deposited me into the car.
I wanted to tell him it was okay, that he didn’t need to be so distant with me, didn’t need to protect himself. But I knew Darius, and what he needed in that moment wasn’t to talk about his feelings. It was to focus on the job at hand. So I let him do that while I tried to sift through all the things I’d learned about him tonight, and get a handle on it.
Especially the way he felt about me. The blood and guilt of his past and those memories of me, as much as he tried to keep it separate in himself, it was all mixed together. I needed time to pull them apart and put them in their proper place so that I could know whether I was seeing what I wanted, or if I was seeing the truth.
Because God knows I wanted Darius to be in love with me. I always had.
“There’s bandages in the bag you’ve got,” he said when we’d pulled onto Queen Anne Avenue.
“Thanks.”
And that was all we said to one another for the next hour.