15. Chapter 15
Chapter 15
Annie
I think I felt him plant soft kisses on my mouth this morning, on my jaw and then down my neck. I’m sure I felt his hot body wrapped around me like a cocoon all night after he eased himself and the vibrator out of me, and then released me from my binds.
My eyes open heavily as thoughts of yesterday come back to me. I sit up, propping myself on my palms to steady the dizziness. I’m dehydrated, but I immediately spot a bottle of water on the bedside table.
Of course Carlton thought of everything.
I take a few greedy swigs, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand afterwards.
My brain kicks in, and the rest of yesterday hits me—my phone call with Aunt Rita, our location being discovered, the Kings on their way to destroy Carlton.
To kill him .
I throw off the cover, but my body screams with soreness when I swing my legs over the edge.
I curse under my breath, supporting the backsides of my thighs with my hands as I gently place my feet on the floor. One glance around the large room tells me Carlton isn’t here. I call out his name, but he doesn’t reply from the bathroom either. I drag myself to the door and yank it open. A draft runs through my hair, a sinister breeze. This castle has been empty except for Carlton and me ever since he brought me here, but today the feeling of foreboding is overwhelming.
As if his present is entirely gone and only his past remains.
Holding on to the wall in order to support my still shaking body, I head down the corridor toward the grand stairs. I’m wearing the same dress I did yesterday, so I have to hold up the skirt and hurry down the stairs as fast as my sore body will let me, feeling slick and sticky between my legs. I call out Carlton’s name, looking for him in the main hall, the ballrooms, the kitchen, and even the dark, creepy passageways in the ruins of the eastern wing. I bang my fists against the iron door with the skull and the crown on thorns, but he’s not in here either. Why would he be? Whatever technology this room might have, it’s no longer going to help us.
Desperation clogs my throat.
He went out there alone to draw attention to himself, to keep me out of danger.
By the time I emerge into the front garden I’ve forgotten all about the discomfort in my body. The only thing that matters is getting to him, helping him in any way that I can. Whatever happens, I can’t lose him.
I’m close to the gate when I see him. My body slams into the black iron gate, my hands grabbing the bars. There he is, down in the gulf between the cliffs. He’s surrounded by six men, all poised with their hands on what looks like guns to their sides.
I cry out his name, but the wind carries my voice in another direction.
I yank on the lock, but I can barely move the heavy chains. Forcing myself to gather my wits, I look around for the rock under which I know he keeps the key. I saw it every time he took me out to show me the surroundings. I find it, but the victory is short-lived, since fitting it into the lock and getting the rusted, heavy thing to twist takes all of my muscle power. I’m panting by the time I manage to untangle the damned chains, and then crack one of the gates enough to create a gap between it and its other half, and squeeze myself between them.
Gathering my dress in my hands, I run and jump over shrubbery, ignoring the stab of twigs against my naked soles. My dress catches in gnarled branches, ripping through the fabric as I push forward toward the beach. Yet the closer I come, the more I realize no good will come out of my jumping into the scene. It will only serve to thwart Carlton’s focus, making him more vulnerable to the enemies surrounding him.
I’m close enough that I now recognize Aragon Kovac as the one pressing toward Carlton from the group. I see his body is angled forward, his hands like claws to his sides, ready to grab his weapons—knives, not guns. He wants this fight to be physical. And personal.
I skid to a halt, my heels digging into the pebbles. I try to hunker down behind a boulder, while thinking of a way to help him but, in my panic, I’ve taken no measures to keep myself out of sight, and didn’t stop to think that someone might have seen me coming. I only realize my mistake too late, when a hand covers my mouth from behind, pulling me up to my feet.
“Well, well, well, what do we have here?”
I recognize Rainer Kovac in a second. His cologne stings with a rancid bite, and the scruff on the side of his face is scratching my skin.
“Little red riding hood, not being careful and running straight into the wolf.”
I struggle against him, but he holds me tight with my back against his chest, walking with me through the shrubbery towards the group of men cornering Carlton. My nostrils flare as I try to pull in air over his hand, my lungs burning from the panicked attempts.
The men turn to us as he brings me forward. Carlton’s jaw drops for the first time in as long as I’ve known him. The pebbles cut into my feet, and I register it happen, but the pain doesn’t hit because my veins are pumped up with adrenaline.
“Ah, there she is, your little pet,” Aragon says, licking his teeth like a wolf about to tear into its prey. “I bet you thought you could keep her safe in your mansion by intercepting us here. But it turns out you can’t control her even when you trap her.” He looks around at the other guys who gather around him, while still cornering Carlton. “We’ll be taking turns with her, just the way she likes it. Otherwise why would she have promised my boys here to take them in all her holes once you were done with her?” His eyes rest on me, and they’re full of poison. The motherfucker is horny just thinking about the things that come out of his mouth. “It’s why you called dear old auntie, didn’t you, Annie? Deep down, you knew this was going to happen, and you wanted it to.”
Rainer’s hand lets go of my mouth, and I take the chance to spit out the words on the tip of my tongue. “You’re fucking sick!”
“That is true,” he says, reaching behind him and whipping out a gun. Everyone takes a step back, except Carlton, who takes one forward. Aragon swivels to point the gun at him, but Carlton is quicker and whips out one of his own. Within a split second, the two men are pointing guns at each other’s faces.
My heart jumps into my throat, but I can’t scream. I can’t even blink .
Aragon grins wider, his canines seeming longer than the rest of his teeth.
“I may be sick,” he says as if to drag out this horrible situation, “but you must have known that your auntie’s phone was being bugged. You’re a tech nerd after all. A genius even. Not just anyone could have slipped into our chat rooms like that, or gotten a pharma mogul to book you for a lifetime of work in his companies.”
My eyes dart between him and Carlton.
“Yes,” Aragon goes on, dripping with satisfaction. “He was the one who booked you for life in exchange for the extra scholarships you got. Your brain drew his attention before he even knew you. But the fact that you’re brilliant doesn’t change the fact that you’re a slut, does it? You couldn’t live with the idea of being with just one man for the rest of your life, much less trapped in the ruins of a castle. You wanted to get rid of him, and your brilliant mind found a brilliant way—calling auntie dearest’s bugged phone.”
He pauses for a few moments, letting the uncertainty set in between Carlton and me .
“That’s not true,” I cry out, but Rainer’s hand slaps my mouth again, and he yanks me back against his chest.
“Take your filthy hands off of her or I swear to God, I’ll chop them both off,” Carlton thunders. I can feel his attention pointed like a razor at Rainer, but the barrel of his gun stays fixed on Aragon. “Slowly,” he adds.
“Come on, jungle snake, you must have thought about it, at least once,”Aragon says, starting to circle him, placing one foot in front of the other. Carlton mirrors his every move, perfectly in tune with his opponent. “You’re a smart guy. You must have considered that she did it on purpose.” Then, even more poisonous, “you knew she’d try to run away from you someday. No woman could love a monster, not for real.”
I scream into Rainer’s hand that I do love him, I love Carlton Wilde with all my heart, but my words are muffled against it, his palm smeared with my drool. I can’t even bite into it, my teeth slipping down mounds of flesh. All it accomplishes is to make him hiss with arousal .
“Easy now, sweetie,” he says in my ear, that whiff of rancid smell reaching me. “I’m starting to get ideas about biting your pretty fingers off one by one when the show is over. Maybe my brother will even have your man watch.”
Every muscle tightens in Carlton’s body, and the tic in his jaw tells me he has a hard time controlling himself. It’s what these two bastards are playing on. Making him snap. Lose his focus. Make a mistake.
The others start circling too, bent forward like they’re ready to spring, hands like claws and ready to pull guns from their holsters.
Carlton is outnumbered.
There’s no way he can win this, and there’s nothing I can do to help him. Not to mention that this is happening because of me.
Aragon is right. I should have known. It was stupid to call Aunt Rita, and someone with my expertise should have been far more cautious.
As I’m wracking my brain trying to think our way out of this, something shifts in the corner of my eye. By the time I make out one of the guys unsheathing a knife and lunging toward Carlton’s back, it’s too late .
I struggle hopelessly against Rainer’s hold, but he keeps steady. He laughs sadistically in my ear, clearly enjoying this. I scream into his hand with all I have, blood rushing to my face in heat waves. But just as the tip of the bastard’s knife is about to ram into the back of Carlton’s neck, the killer freezes. His jaw slowly slackens as the knife falls to the ground, clanging against the pebbles. My eyes follow it, stopping on the blood darkening his shirt, quickly spreading into a large stain, just above his groin. The hilt of a knife is sticking out of the wound, still connected to Carlton’s hand.
He killed a guy without even looking at him. As if he had fucking eyes behind his back.
The guy’s body tilts backward, and he hits the ground, landing sprawled on the rocks.
The others stare like they’ve never seen this kind of skill before, not daring to attack again. Only Aragon looks angry as hell, gripping his gun with a second hand, too.
“Anyone else eager to die?” Carlton dares them, his dark eyes fixed on Aragon, but clearly aware of all opponents surrounding him .
I look around at the five remaining men. Some of them must have been at the ritual that night, but not all of them. Carlton neutralized two right there and then.
“Put a damper on that joy, sweetie,” Rainer says when I shift in his grip. “Your boyfriend doesn’t stand a chance. That was just dumb luck.”
Carlton grins, not taking his eyes off Aragon, but addressing Rainer when he speaks.
“Why don’t you take a chance and find out?”
Rainer tenses behind me, making himself smaller. He’s a hyena with no sense of honor or courage. I laugh behind his hand, and make sure he knows it. He hisses out a curse, but doesn’t dare call me names anymore, not after Carlton just killed a man with seemingly supernatural ability.
I look down to my midsection, where Rainer’s arm is wrapped around me. A bandage runs over the palm of his hand and over the stub of his index finger, even though it’s been removed for a while now, so it can’t hurt anymore. Grabbing and twisting won’t accomplish anything.
“We all know you’re a cruel beast, jungle snake, but ordering my own brother to gut me?” Aragon clicks his tongue. “That’s a whole new level of sick, even for you.”
“We’re called Heathens for a reason.”
“Indeed. But you’re a true inspiration. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Elders canonized you after I killed you.” Hatred flies out of his mouth, but he doesn’t get to enjoy it for long.
A deafening sound rips through the air, abusing my eardrums.
My hands fly to my ears, and Rainer’s instantly fall off of me. It takes precious seconds for me to draw behind the boulder where I initially wanted to hide, right across the dirt path from the one where Rainer takes shelter.
I can’t believe my eyes.
This is beyond John Wick.
All the others have hit the ground, while Carlton and Aragon keep shooting at each other, blocking each other’s arms every time they swivel and turn and pull the trigger.
I can’t be sure who shot first, but something tells me it was Carlton .
This is fighting on a whole new level, both stopping to expertly attach silencers to their guns at the same time before they resume shooting at each other. We’re far from other human settlements, but this isn’t an abandoned island.
It takes monumental effort to keep quiet, not wanting to distract Carlton. Even the smallest distraction could mean his life, and I wouldn’t risk it for the world. I keep down as bullets fly in all directions until one of them finally ricochets right off my rock.
That’s when the tides turn.
Scared, I jump out from behind the boulder, and Carlton’s focus shifts to me.
Time slows down, a single second stretching out to a painful length.
I see it all in slow motion.
The grin pulling Aragon’s mouth.
Carlton’s eyes widening.
Him stepping into the line of fire as Aragon points his gun at me.
Me, staring right down the barrel as Carlton blocks it from sight .
The world goes silent, my scream long and soundless as Carlton’s body jerks forward, right after the bullet hits him.
Nothing matters anymore.
I stumble over my own feet and fall down to my knees on the pebbles just as Carlton’s hit the ground. I touch him all over in a desperate attempt to fix him, reverse this terrible reality.
“No, no, no, Jesus, please no,” I cry, running my hands down his neck and through his hair, trying to find the wound.
Slowly, he places his gun down between us and takes my hands in his. He keeps his eyes on mine as Aragon approaches, the gravel crunching under his boots.
“Who would have thought, jungle snake, that you would end up dying for love?” Then, shifting his attention to me. “And that your lover would have to live with the guilt? For how long remains to be seen.”
Carlton places his hands on my face, making me look at him through the tears clinging to my eyelashes. I break out into ugly crying, clinging to him .
“I swear,” I manage while choking on my own hiccups, “I’ll destroy him. I’ll make him sorry he was ever born if it’s the last thing I’ll fucking do.” I’m a digital expert after all. I’m not a military or a mercenary, but I can do damage.
“If you live long enough to do it, sweetie,” Rainer says with a triumphant grin as he joins his brother. “Which you most probably won’t.” Then, with a fake pout, “It makes me so sad that your boyfriend here won’t live long enough to watch you die.”
Aragon laughs, looking down at us with vengeful hunger. “You could, I suppose, apologize to my brother here for having humiliated him in front of a hooker, and for cutting off his finger, and we might just let your girlfriend get away with most of hers.”
My teary eyes hang on Carlton. He seems so calm, so accepting, his intense dark eyes full of a mysterious feeling. He never said those three words, he never said, “I love you”, but he took a bullet for me.
He gave his life for me.
“I don’t care about the fucking fingers,” I whisper, adrenaline and rage coursing through my veins so that I can’t even feel pain. My body has become completely numb. “I’ll bring these bastards down.” I already imagine ways to forge their criminal records. It won’t be easy, it will take years, and I’ll have to work from hiding, but I’ll destroy these pieces of shit or die trying.
But Carlton gives me a soft, warm smile that takes my breath away. He’s never smiled at me like this before. He takes my hands and places them on his body, spreading them on his chest.
Aragon keeps talking, his brother looking down at us with that hyena grin on his face, but I tune them out. At first, I think Carlton is trying to show me his wound, but then I feel something rectangular and flat strapped close to his waist under his shirt. Guiding my hands further, my fingers run over multiple such objects.
My eyes widen with each one of them I discover, understanding what they are.
Bombs.
Carlton came here with bombs strapped around his body, ready to blow himself up and take his enemies down with him .
“Jesus Christ,” I whisper, pain crushing my chest. I shake my head, unwilling to accept his plan.
Aragon admires Carlton’s level of cruelty, but he has no idea about the level of his self-hatred and ability to self-destruct. He doesn’t have a clue about the demons that have been plaguing him all these years, making him capable of a kamikaze mission.
But he won’t blow himself up, not now, not with me attached to his body.
His gaze speaks volumes, urging me to run so he can press the button, wherever it is. I can’t help thinking that, if the bullet had hit him in one of those devices, we’d all be dead now, and it would have probably been for the better.
“I won’t leave you.” I pull my hands from his and cup his jaw, tilting his head down so that his forehead rests against mine. “I’m staying.”
“Annie,” he says in a heart-breaking, gruff voice, “I love you, I want you to know that. I fell in love with you the moment I saw you, but I refused to accept it and fought against it with everything I had.”
“Please,” I beg, caressing his face, “don’t talk, don’t strain yourself. ”
“I need to.” He coughs again, and I can’t help but cry harder, hating how we’re both falling apart in front of these bastards.
“I didn’t know the feeling, and it scared the shit out of me,” he continues. “I knew what to do with the hunger of the beast whenever you flaunted that perfect ass of yours in front of me, but not with the bottomless black hole opening in my chest, asking that I sacrifice you to it like an evil god.”
Taking my head in his hands, he plants a soft kiss on my lips. I close my eyes, taking in the sensation.
“Your last fuck must have been epic,” Aragon’s voice cuts through our moment. “If only we’d arrived earlier, we might have seen you fuck her with abandonment, jungle snake. It’s a shame that we missed the show, but I guess we’ll have to live with that loss.” With that, he points his gun at Carlton’s head. “Time to say goodbye, lover-boy. Unless you prefer to watch me cut off her fingers one by one before I send her on her last journey at sea, leaving her at the mercy of the waves. just imagine what the salt water will do to her wounds. ”
I’m crying like a baby, but not because of what he intends to do to me. I’m crying because I didn’t get the chance to give Carlton one complete moment of happiness in the time we’ve been together. One moment of complete bliss. A moment like those I experienced as a kid back home, after the town fests when all of us children fell asleep around campfires, exhausted from play and stories.
A time when he’d already killed, and carved faces off of skulls.
Carlton kisses my cheek before whispering in my ear, “Trust me.”
I stop crying, scrunching my eyebrows for better focus when he looks into my face again.
I wasn’t wrong. The killer’s glint flickers in it.
Next thing I know, he knocks his shoulder into Aragon’s abdomen, causing the latter to double over with a grunt, dropping his gun down on the rocks. Carlton throws his whole body into him and knocks him back hard, mowing down his brother and three other guys along with them.
I struggle up to my feet, my knees screaming as I watch in horror how they grapple with each other. The two other men who remain standing glance at me and then turn around, running for their lives. They might not know about the bombs strapped to Carlton’s body, but they know enough about the jungle snake to expect that, once he got up, they would only have minutes to live.
Carlton tackles Aragon, but Rainer is crawling away from the commotion, toward the gun that his brother dropped on the ground.
My eyes fly from him to the gun.
From the gun to him.
This is my chance. I bend down and grab the weapon, meeting Rainer’s eyes as I straighten up with it in my hand. I saw Aragon pull the safety. The gun is ready. All I have to do is pull the trigger.
He stares up at me from all fours, and a strange feeling seeps into my chest.
The feeling that I should put a bullet right between his eyebrows, and that I wouldn’t feel guilty a day in my life. A sense of strength but also responsibility spreads out through me—I can make this easier for Carlton, or harder. Right now I’m capable of much more than destroying these bastards just by digital means. I can do it in a very physical, very real, very immediate way.
“Please,” Rainer begs, and it’s a sweet, sweet, sound. I tilt my head to the side, slowly pointing the gun at him. Enjoying how the dread spreads over his face.
“Say pretty please.” My voice is chillingly calm, even to me.
“Pretty please.”
For a moment, I think about just shooting him in the ass. But then I remember what he did that night at the pub. How he humiliated me, the stuff he wanted to do, the way his buddy intimidated Mel. How he enjoyed the prospect of killing my lover and torturing me today.
“So it’s true,” I murmur. “You really don’t have one bit of backbone.”
Adding another hand to hold the gun down at the magazine, I pull the trigger. The silencer is on, but the recoil slams into my shoulder. If I weren’t holding tight, it would send me on my ass.
Lowering the gun, I see that I was far from shooting him between the eyes. There’s a perfectly round, small hole on the side of his forehead, and his jaw slowly drops, as if he can’t believe what just happened. That this is his end—shot dead by me.
A male cry rips across the beach, and my eyes fly up to meet Aragon’s enraged face as he watches his brother hit the pebble-covered beach, blood trickling from the hole in his forehead. Fascinating, how such a little thing can end a man’s life.
Aragon throws himself forward, clawing at the pebbles trying to reach his brother, but Carlton grabs his arms and pins him on the ground, pulling Aragon’s wrists behind his back, and pressing his knee down on his spine. Then he rips his shirt, revealing the bullet-proof vest and the rows of flat bombs strapped to his waist.
My mind stops at the vest—the bullet. That’s why it didn’t kill him. It didn’t even wound him.
I watch him hold out his hand to the guys who stayed, who look like they’re afraid to even breathe around him.
“Your handcuffs,” he tells one of them.
The man scrambles for a set of handcuffs attached to his gear, handing it over, then stumbling backward like he’s afraid the jungle snake might bite. Carlton snaps the handcuffs around Aragon’s wrists with the ease of an expert. It’s incredible how the man’s grunts and struggles have nothing on him. He unstraps the belts of bombs and wraps them around Aragon’s body under the others’ terrified eyes, as well as mine.
Grabbing Aragon by his collar, he stands up, pulling the man up with him.
When Aragon’s eyes meet mine, they’re not only angry. The man is scared stiff. If I had an ounce of empathy left, maybe I’d see grief, too, for the brother lying at my feet, his cheek crushed against the pebbles and his blood trickling among them.
Just like the first man Carlton killed in front of me ended up lying at my feet. Only that this time, I’m the one holding the weapon.
The hand with the gun trembles, but I only become aware of it when Aragon’s eyes drop down and then move back again to my face with a strange mix of hatred and…is that respect? My mouth twists into a bitter expression.
“How sad that you can only respect murderers,” I hear myself say .
“So you still don’t understand,” he retorts, immune to my insult. “We’re all murderers. All waiting for the right motive.” He cocks his head to the side. “You didn’t kill my brother for your jungle snake. You killed him for yourself.”
Carlton yanks him back, dragging him toward the sea, but he keeps those eyes on me until Carlton shoves him down. He beckons the other guys over, and they hurry toward him like dogs wagging their tails. Carlton points to the cliffs.
“There are three boats behind those—but you already know that. Put him in a motor boat, and send him out to sea.” He reaches behind his back, producing a detonator that he places in one of the men’s hands. “When he’s a few miles from shore, blow him up. Do it, and I swear by my honor as a Heathen King and a McKenzie laird that I’ll never come after you again for the rest of your lives.”
The men stare at each other and the detonator like it’s from another planet, while Aragon bursts into laughter.
“They weren’t kidding when they said you were one of the most creative torturers that ever lived,” he says, looking like he’s losing his mind at the prospect of how he’s going to die, and laughter is his way of coping with it. “Too bad they’re giving all the dirty work to Micah Royales. You’d be much better than him at the job.”
“You’re saying that because you don’t know Micah,” Carlton replies. “Which is a loss. I wish you could have experienced his skill before you died.”
With that, Carlton hands him over to the other guys, who drag him forward toward the cliffs. Even though they get to keep their guns, none of them takes the slightest chance to try anything on him as he heads over to me. Not after what they witnessed him do.
He slowly removes the gun from my hand, tucking it into his belt before he winds an arm around my shoulders and we start walking after the men like a mourning couple. Reaching the base of the cliffs, a strip of rocky beach snaking along the edges where the waves roll in to kiss it, I stop.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to see this,” Carlton says in a soft tone.
“On the contrary,” I whisper. “It scares me that I do. ”
His arm tightens around me, his body warming mine.
“I’m here,” he rumbles, and I’ve never felt safer. “And I’m never leaving again.”
I look up at him, and my numb heart fills with emotion.
“You were going to. You were going to blow yourself up and take all of these bastards along with you.”
He sighs a deep breath, gripping my chin between his fingers so that I keep my eyes on him.
“It was the only way to make all your problems go away, Annie. And I would do it all over again.”
“You went on a suicide mission for me, and then you stepped in front of a bullet.” Yes, he was wearing a bullet-proof vest, but the bullet could have hit him in the back of his head. He reacted on pure instinct, not calculation.
He bends down and plants one of those delicious kisses on my lips, making this fucked-up world okay again.
“I love you, Annie Jones,” he says, his voice the soft rumble of distant summer thunder. “It’s the truth, and I’m done resisting it. Done shelving it as insane lust or need or even fucking trauma coming back to bite me in the ass.” He caresses my face with his fingers, his eyes tracing the movement, his voice melting into my brain. “I’ve been in love with you since before the ritual, and I resented you for it. I was in love with you the first time I killed for you. I never believed in bullshit soul mates but you and me, Annie? We were destined to be together, and it’s time we accepted it—along with the rest of the world.”
He pulls me into a kiss, and I dissolve into him with every stroke of his tongue against mine.
Soon, we’re up on the cliffs, his protective arms wrapped around me from behind as the wind carries over the blast when Aragon Kovac’s boat goes up in flames. I don’t even blink against the spray of saltwater that reaches us from the waves breaking against the cliffs. My heart doesn’t beat any faster, my blood alive with no other feeling than the feeling of Carlton—and the awareness that a part of me has changed forever.
I wonder if the hole in Rainer’s forehead is going to haunt me the way the dead man from the mayhem did. But if it does, it won’t be only the thought of Carlton that will be there to soothe me in the middle of the night. It will be him, in the flesh. No matter what I have to do to Rosalind Hayes to make that happen. I have a set of wicked skills. It’s time I put them to good use.