Dark Wrath (5 page)

Even in the
dimness of the room the look he bent upon her was enough to freeze the blood in
her veins.

She was too
mindless with fear to consider giving up without a fight though.  The
minute he climbed off of her, she launched another attack, drawing her knees up
and kicking out at him.  He sprawled across her, pinning her to the bed as
he grabbed one leg, straightened it in spite of all she could do to prevent it
and tied something around her ankle.

She winced as he
jerked the knot tight.

He levered
himself off of her then.

She swung her
foot at his face as he reached to grab her other ankle.  He caught it
mid-air.  Shoving her leg to the mattress, he looped something around her
ankle and jerked that tight as well.

She stared at
him, panting for breath as he got off the bed and moved around to the foot,
checking the rope he’d used to secure her ankles.

Apparently
satisfied, he moved away from the bed.  Erin heard a scratching
noise.  The smell of sulfur wafted past her nose as a match sprang to
life.  Holding it to the wick of a lamp, he adjusted it, replaced the
globe over the flame and moved back to the bed, setting the lamp down on a
small table beside it.

Erin’s belly
tightened spasmodically as he settled on the side of the bed and she saw his
face clearly for the first time in the light of the lamp.

Her memories
hadn’t done him justice.  Or maybe she had simply never really looked at
him before when she’d only thought of him as an animal?

Analyzed one by
one, she supposed there was nothing particularly remarkable about his features
or the lean plains of his cheeks and strong jaw and chin.  There was a
hint of a cleft in his chin and a slightly crescent shaped dimple in each
cheek, faintly visible even when he wasn’t smiling.  His nose was straight
and well-shaped, his nostrils flaring in a way that left them just shy of a
perpetual sneer.  His lips were well defined, but thin and hard.  His
brows were nothing more than a thick, dark slash, without a hint of an arch.

His eyes of all
his features, was the only one truly remarkable.  Surrounded by thick,
curling black lashes, they would’ve been beautiful if not for the fury
glittering in them as he studied her.

Taken together as
a whole, he was enough to knock any red blooded woman’s socks off, particularly
with the long, glossy black hair that framed his purely male face.

“I thought you
were dead,” she said finally.

His lips
tightened.  “Thought?  Or hoped?”

She felt the
color leave her face.  “You think I wanted you dead?”

“Didn’t
you?  Isn’t that why you released me?  It was you, wasn’t it,
chère
?”

She gaped at him
in disbelief.  “I was trying to help….”

“Me?  Or
yourself?” he growled menacingly.

Dragging his
shirt off, he displayed his back for her and then his chest.  Erin was so
mesmerized by the play of hard, bulging muscles with his movements that it took
her several moments to realize his back, chest and arms were marred with
scars--round scars--at least a half a dozen, she thought, though it was very
likely that some of the bullets had passed through him and made two holes.

She found it
nearly impossible to accept that he’d been hit that many times and survived.

But then again …
he wasn’t human.

Strange that she
had to remind herself of that now when before she hadn’t thought of him as
human at all.

Or maybe it wasn’t
so strange.  In the scheme of things, the revulsion she’d learned for her
own species because of the things they were capable of made it a little harder
to decide which species was more animalistic than the other.  He, at
least, had had ample reason to behave as he had.  He’d been put through
things that would have broken a human’s mind.  The pursuit of knowledge
wasn’t an excuse for what they’d done to him--and to her.

He leaned over
her, bracing a fist on either side of her on the bed and she realized the
question hadn’t been purely rhetorical.  He wanted to know.  The
problem was … there was no simple answer.  “If I’d wanted you dead, I
didn’t have to do anything at all.  They would’ve destroyed you when they
were done.  Don’t tell me you don’t know that!”

It wasn’t the
answer he’d been looking for.  She could see that in his expression. 
He pushed away from her abruptly, stood up.  Her heart squeezed painfully
in her chest when he pulled a long knife from a sheathe on his belt, testing
the sharpness of the blade with the ball of his thumb.

His gaze moved
from the thin cut on his thumb to her, snagging her gaze for a pregnant
moment.  “You should hold real still,
chère
.”

She stared at him
blankly, unable to grasp what he meant until he leaned over her and grasped the
leg of her trousers.  Hooking the knife under it, he drew it upward
slowly.  She jerked instinctively and felt a sting as the tip of the blade
nicked her thigh.  “What are you doing?” she gasped with a mixture of
horror and outrage.

He didn’t even
glance at her.  His concentration was focused on slicing her clothing
off.  When he’d sliced the cloth through the waistband, he moved around
the bed and repeated the process.  Her panties didn’t take even half as
long to remove.

“Jesse! 
Stop!  Don’t do this!  Whatever you think I’ve done, you’re wrong.”

He ignored that,
too.  Her blouse fared no better than her pants.  She started
struggling despite the warning when he grasped the straps of her bra. 
“You made your point!  Stop it!”

Having cut the
straps, he slipped the knife beneath the part of the bra that connected the
cups and sliced it before his gaze met hers again.  “I haven’t even begun
ta make my point,
chère
,” he said in a low, menacing growl.

Erin licked her
lips, jogging her mind for anything she might say to reason with him.  “I
did the only thing I could.  I knew they would shoot at you, but at least
it gave you a chance.  There
was
no other chance.  I couldn’t
get out of the facility myself.”

His eyes narrowed
as he studied her thoughtfully.  “Me, I’m thinkin’ you didn’t care one way
or the other,
chère
, so long as I was gone.  I’m thinkin’ you
figured that was the only way to make sure they didn’t put you in with me
again, because you’d realized you was startin’ to like me fuckin’ you.”

Erin felt the
blood rush from her face that he’d hit so near the mark.  It flooded back
with a vengeance until her cheeks were pulsing with color.  “That had
nothing to do with it!”

She might as well
have saved her breath.  She saw her reaction was enough to tell him a part
of the truth she hadn’t been willing to acknowledge even to herself.  The
chances of explaining her chaotic emotions at that time to him were pretty much
nil, though, because she hadn’t completely understood herself.  She still
didn’t.  “What are you going to do?” she gasped, struggling to stave off
hysteria.

“I made you a
promise,” he said evenly.

Erin stared at
him, trying to recall everything that had passed between them so long
ago.  It wasn’t easy given that she’d spent an entire year doing her
utmost to submerge those memories.  That particular memory surfaced
without a great deal of prodding though.

“You killed the
others?”

“Unfortunately
for me, they were gone by the time I recovered enough to look for them. 
The trail was too cold to follow.  That leaves you and the rat bastard
that orchestrated my capture and torture.  But I’m thinkin’ you can give
me him.”

“You didn’t kill
Freda Dallas.  I don’t believe you’re a cold blooded killer.”

“Then you’d be
wrong,
chère. 
She was lucky.  It happened real quick. 
Caught her by surprise when they lay down on me and got her too.  I have
to say I was very disappointed I didn’t get a chance to settle things between
us, but then maybe it was just as well.  Sick bitch would probly enjoyed
it.  I wonder if you will.”

“I didn’t have
anything to do with what they were doing!” Erin cried out with a mixture of
anger, fear, and desperation.  “They brought me into the project later,
after they’d captured you.  I didn’t even know what they were doing until
they sent me in there the first time.”

His lips curled,
but there was no humor in his eyes.  “Then this is gonna be a real
surprise for you, ain’t it,
chère?
”

Erin started
fighting the bindings uselessly.  “Let me go!  You have to let me
go!  I don’t know where Dr. Wagner is.  I’ve been looking for him
since I escaped.  That’s why I came here.  I thought they might have
reopened the facility.  It was the only lead I had.”

Something
flickered in his eyes, but she could see that he didn’t believe anything she’d
said.

“This is the way
it works,
chère
.  Over dere is the facilities.  You get to use
them once a day.  Now I’m a soft hearted son-of-a-bitch so I’m gonna let
you tell me when you need to go instead of takin’ you when I feel like
it.  You need ta think real hard before you ask, though, ‘cause that’s
once a day, no matter what.

“It won’t be a
real problem for you long, though, ‘cause you only get food and water once a
day, too--if you’re good and I’m feelin’ charitable.  If you piss me off,
you don’t get any ‘privileges.’  You just get to look at the food and
water and think about using the facilities.”

Horror filled
Erin, not just because of what he was suggesting he was going to do to her, but
because she realized he was telling her that that was what they’d done to
him--for months.  Even she had no idea how long they’d kept him chained in
that cage, but she knew he had been captured long before she came to the
facility, and she knew she had been a part of the experiment for over a month.

“I want to find
him as much as you do.  Let me go!  I’ll help you.”

Frustration
filled her as he left the room, closing the door behind him.  She tugged
at the bindings after he’d gone, twisting her head to look up at them. 
Her fingers were already numb.  The rag the others had used to bind her
wasn’t tight enough to completely cut off the circulation and she’d had her
hands bound in front of her, which had allowed some circulation.  With the
binding Jesse had looped around her already bound wrists, and the position of
her arms, it hadn’t taken long for the numbness to become more
pronounced.  Concentrating, she wiggled her fingers and arms as much as
she could, not because she thought there was any real chance of getting loose,
but to keep some of the circulation flowing through her arms and hands.

She was rewarded
for her efforts with stinging pain.  Gritting her teeth, she continued
until her fingers didn’t feel so stiff and swollen.

If she could only
pull herself up a little higher on the bed, she thought, maybe she could get
enough slack to slip her bound hands from the loop?

She discovered
very quickly that there wasn’t enough slack in the cords around her ankles to
allow for it.  Even when she’d stretched until it felt as if every joint
from her groin down would separate, it wasn’t quite enough.

She subsided
after a while, wondering if he did mean to kill her.  Her throat closed at
that thought.

* * * *

Jesse strode
through the front room and out onto the porch, staring up at the night sky
while he struggled to bring his heart rate and breathing back to normal. 
He felt more than vaguely nauseated.  For several moments, he held his
hands out, palm up, staring angrily at the tremor in them.

He hadn’t
anticipated the things he’d felt from the moment he’d set eyes on her.  He
wondered if she’d been able to tell the effect she had on him, or if she’d been
under too much duress herself to see his sorry state.

After a few
minutes, he plopped his butt down on the edge of the porch and settled his feet
on the lower step, struggling to summon the hatred that had consumed him for so
long, that had carried him through the months it had taken him to recover from
his wounds, that had kept him from totally losing his mind in the months after
that when he had searched for her so frantically.

Of all the stupid
things that he had done because of her, marking her was probably one of the
stupidest.  The link alone had tortured him.  It hadn’t been strong
enough to help him find her and yet it had been strong enough to taunt him.

Propping one
elbow on his knee, he speared his fingers through his hair, propping his
forehead on his palm while he tried to remember, and sort through, the things
she’d said.  Derisively, he realized he didn’t remember a hell of a
lot.  He’d been the next thing to mindless, roiling emotion even before
he’d stripped her.  From the moment he’d begun that, it had been far more
torture to him than her because he hadn’t been able to get his mind off of his
memories of stroking her soft skin, her taste, the way she’d felt when he had
sunk himself deeply inside of her.  The sounds of pleasure she’d made.

His mouth went
dry.

With an effort,
he pushed the memories aside.  He hadn’t waited all this time to allow
himself to be sucked in by her again.

The fury he’d
been questing for rose inside of him at that thought.  He hated all of
them for what they’d done to him, but he hated her worst of all.  Nothing
they could do could touch him as she could.  Nothing they could have
thought of to do could have given him nearly as much pain.

He’d thought he
loved her.  All she’d had to do was be the one bright moment in that hell,
the one person who offered him any kindness at all.  He would’ve believed
he was in love with her even if she hadn’t been so beautiful he’d been almost willing
to gnaw his arms off to get to her.

He might have
been more than tempted if he hadn’t seen that she was as afraid of him as she
was fascinated by him.