15. REAPER
15
REAPER
S iren paces through the shore of the lake, dragging her feet through the cool water in nothing but my shirt as I sit on the damp sand, watching her move from left to right. Her little cami and sleep shorts were nowhere to be found, but the second they were removed from her body, I couldn’t care less about them.
Siren is one of those women who should be in a constant state of nakedness. Her body is flawless, absolutely perfect, and I’m going to make it my personal mission to devour as much of it as I possibly can before these twenty days are over.
“Okay, tell me this,” she says, pausing ankle deep in the water and looking back at me. She’s been asking me questions for the last twenty minutes, trying to get to the bottom of all the intel she was able to dig up on me, trying to decipher what’s real and what was fabricated by local enforcement. “What’s your real name?”
Fuck me. I’d be more comfortable asking her to perform a rectal exam on me than giving up that kind of information. I’ve held my name close for a long time, not having to use it in close to fifteen years. The few people who are closest to me don’t even know it, and yet, for whatever reason, I haven’t told her to fuck right off with her line of questioning. Perhaps it’s the post-nut clarity that’s making me play nice in the hopes she’ll allow me to have her again, because fuck, after that first taste, I’m addicted.
“Oh, come on,” Siren says, walking over to me and dropping down in my lap, her knees on either side of my thighs as I feel the warmth of her sweet cunt through the front of my pants. I have to work hard not to remind myself that she’s not wearing any underwear. “You figured out my name, and not only that, you used it against me. It’s only fair that I know yours.”
I let out a heavy breath. “I don’t use my real name.”
Siren nods, and sadness begins to consume her. “I understand that more than you could possibly know.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
She offers me a sad smile, trying to push through the pain of whatever trauma is plaguing her mind. “No, but thanks.”
I nod, not wanting to push her on something that so clearly affects her so much. Instead, all I want is to make her happy, to see just a fraction of a smile pull across her lips, and to bask in the way her eyes light up. “My name,” I say, feeling more vulnerable than I ever have in my life. “Is Nikolai Volkov.”
Her eyes widen in surprise, the sadness in her eyes quickly fading away. “You’re Russian?”
I shrug my shoulders. “I suppose. I never knew my parents or where I came from. I was left at the door of an orphanage in Jersey at six months old with nothing more than a birth certificate and a blanket. I’ve lived in the US all my life.”
“Shit, I’m sorry,” she says. “Did you ever try to track your parents down?”
“Once,” I admit. “My mother died a few years after I was born from a drug overdose, and my father . . . He was a piece of shit. Turns out that my mother was trafficked at sixteen years old and sold to my father. I guess he raped her until he knocked her up, and after she’d given birth, he either tossed her aside or she made a break for it. I never really got a chance to get all the details before I snapped his neck.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah. That was my first kill.”
Siren holds my stare, nodding before dropping her gaze to my chest, a heaviness flashing in her eyes. “Mine was a friend of my foster father’s when I was fourteen,” she tells me. “I apparently needed to be taught a lesson, and he thought he was the one to do that.”
“Shit,” I say, fucking hating when that shit happens to kids. Don’t get me wrong, it’s terrible no matter the age, but when the innocence of youth is involved, it grinds on my nerves. Especially when it comes from someone who’s supposed to protect them.
Siren places her hand on my chest and my body instantly relaxes. “Don’t worry, he was castrated before he could use it on me.”
Thank fuck for that.
She leans back onto my legs, simply staring at me. “I’m curious about you,” she tells me. “What makes you tick?”
“What makes me tick?” I question, unsure how to even answer that. Fuck, I don’t even think I know what that means.
Siren grins. “Yep. What makes you tick? What gets under your skin?”
“Are you trying to figure out ways to best me? Because it’s not going to work. Nothing gets under my skin.”
“I don’t need to figure out how to best you,” she tells me. “The second I cuffed you to my refrigerator, I realized I already had. If anyone is going to bring you down during these games, it’s going to be me. Besides, look at you, Reaper. I got you pinned on the ground. I could kill you before you even knew what was happening.”
Laughter threatens to burst out of me, and if I wasn’t such a quiet, broody guy, I might have even let it. “There are two things wrong with that statement.”
“Dare I ask what they are?” she throws back at me.
I grin. “Number one. You haven’t got me close to being pinned, and the only reason I’ve allowed you to use me as a bench is because the way you’re leaning back, gives me the perfect view of your sweet little cunt.”
Siren sucks in a breath, grabbing the front of her shirt and pulling it down just enough to cover herself. “And number two?” she prompts.
“Number two,” I say, grabbing her around the throat and gently pulling her into me, her lips barely a breath away from mine. “You couldn’t kill me even if my hands were bound and my cock was buried deep inside you.”
Siren laughs, her eyes shimmering with excitement. “Careful now, you might be giving me ideas.”
Her grin is addictive, and I release my hold on her throat, but as she sits up closer, she drops her gaze to my chest, following the lines of the reaper tattoo that covers most of my body. “This is insane,” she murmurs, her fingers brushing across the design, following it up to the ink that runs up the side of my neck. “I’ve been wanting to find out what this was since the second I saw you.”
“And?”
“It’s terrifying.”
“I don’t wish to scare you, Siren.”
“I know,” she whispers. “But that doesn’t mean that the idea of who you are and what you’re capable of shouldn’t haunt me. You’re going to kill me no matter what happens between us in the next twenty days. I’m right to be wary of you, just as I should be wary of everyone else, Shadow included.”
I nod, agreeing with her completely, and yet the idea of having to end her life suddenly isn’t sitting so well with me. Before tonight, I could have done it. I would have made it quick, made sure she didn’t feel any pain, but now . . . I don’t know. Something has shifted within me.
Lifting my hand, I brush my fingers across the soft skin of her jaw, watching as she folds into my touch. “I don’t want to kill you,” I tell her. “But I will have to in order to protect Shadow.”
She simply holds my stare. “I came into these games so confident that I was going to win. I didn’t expect you to be here, and I sure as hell didn’t expect to find Shadow. I was such an idiot. The second I got the invitation, I could barely contain myself. No part of me thought there was a chance I wouldn’t be going home at the end of it, and now that I’m realizing how wrong I was, I’m not ready to die. I’ve barely had a life outside of work. Never gotten to love someone or be loved in return, never gotten to have a real home or start a family.”
I pull back, meeting her stare straight on. “You want to start a family?”
“Well, no,” she admits. “I don’t particularly care for having kids or anything like that, and to be honest, I’d be a terrible mom, but I want to be able to have the option to start a family if I wanted. Maybe a dog family. I’ve always wanted a golden retriever.”
Understanding fills me. I’ve been where she is a million times before, but in our line of work, a normal life isn’t always something we can have. We aren’t able to put down roots and make plans for a future because we never know where we’re going to be, who we’ll meet, or what job will come next. Not to mention the risk of starting a family only to have your past creep up on you. It’s too dangerous, and that’s when hearts start getting hurt. It’s better this way. Easier. Cleaner.
“I tried the whole girlfriend thing once,” I admit.
Siren arches her brows. “Bullshit. You?”
I nod. “Seriously. Her name was Becca, a cute little brunette with big ole titties.”
“There’s no way,” she laughs. “How did you possibly swing that? Did she know what you do for a living?”
I grin. “No. I told her I was an investment banker, but the night I came home after failing to outrun a grenade, she put it together that perhaps I wasn’t exactly who she thought I was. It didn’t last long after that.”
Siren gapes at me in shock, slowly shaking her head. “I just can’t wrap my head around the fact that you thought you could possibly pull off being an investment banker. Have you looked in a mirror lately? But also, you can’t outrun a grenade? Are you kidding me?”
“Says the woman who accidentally hung herself by her hair.”
She rolls her eyes. “Okay, whatever,” she says. “So we all make stupid little mistakes sometimes. It happens to the best of us.”
I shake my head. “We can’t make mistakes like that in these games.”
“Some would argue that this right here was a mistake.”
“No, Siren. This right here is a lot of things, but a mistake is not one of them.”
She holds my stare, her gaze locked so firmly on mine. “You’re surprising me, Reaper,” she murmurs, keeping her voice low as though she doesn’t trust her tone to come out right. “You’re not what I expected.”
My heart rate kicks up a gear as I lean back onto my palms and watch her. “And what’s that?”
“I thought you would have left afterward, or at the very least killed me now that you got what you wanted, and while that would have sucked, I would have been okay with it because that’s what I was expecting, but sitting with me . . . It’s messing with my head. I’m not supposed to like you.”
“Here’s the thing, Siren,” I say. “Just because you let me chase you down to the lake and fuck you, doesn’t mean I’ve had nearly my fill of you. We have twenty more days, and I intend to spend every minute we have left buried in your sweet little cunt. And as for liking me? You’re treading in dangerous waters. You shouldn’t like me. You shouldn’t even want to like me.”
She shakes her head, leaning back into me and hooking her hand around the back of my neck. “Just because you do the things you do and have seen all the things you’ve seen, doesn’t make you any less human. You’re deserving of love and affection just as much as I am.”
I let out a heavy breath, appreciating that more than she could know, but I have many demons, and this right here is one of my biggest ones. “How can people like us, people who’ve callously slain multiple men and women be deserving of love?”
“For me, I know that I’m still a good person. I have good intentions and a good heart. I don’t just walk out of my home and murder the first person I see like The Texan Reaper would. I kill those who are deserving of death. I do my homework, and at the end of the day, I can walk away from a kill with my dignity intact,” she tells me. “And while I know I don’t know you very well, and I don’t know what motivates you to do what you do, I can tell from the way you’ve protected Shadow and how you’re sitting here with me now that you have a good heart. You’re a good man, and you shouldn’t deny yourself love just because you’ve taken lives.”
I don’t know how to respond. I’ve spent my whole adult life content with my decision that I wasn’t worthy of spending my life with someone, yet in the space of three seconds, this woman has me reconsidering my whole belief system.
“I can’t lie, Siren. You’re surprising me too,” I tell her.
“In a good way or a bad way?” she asks.
“An unexpected way.”
She laughs. “Who knows, maybe this is all an act, and I’m playing you just to get close.”
I shake my head. “Like I said, I’m too fucking good, baby. You can try and kill me all you like, play me until your fucking fingers bleed, but you won’t kill me, and it’s not because you’re not capable. I’ve been watching you, Siren. You’re good. Too fucking good. The way you work is like a dance. It’s intriguing and yet devastatingly beautiful. To be killed by you would be nothing but an honor, but unfortunately, no matter how good you are, I’m better.”
Siren grins and leans into me. “You know what I like about you underestimating me?” she questions, pushing up off me and starting to walk away.
“What’s that?” I call after her.
She glances back over her shoulder, a seductive grin on her lips. “You’ll never see me coming.” And with that, she slips away into the darkness, leaving me gasping for air.
I follow her home from a distance, tracking her every step before watching as she makes her way back inside her villa and takes herself to bed. Then as I sit outside her villa, watching over her for the night and making sure none of the other six contenders decide to make her a target, I realize that I’m not just intrigued by this girl, I’m obsessed.