Break Me Open (13 page)

We lay panting wrong-ways on the bed. Ghost played with my damp hair.

“Does that mean I can trust you too?” he said.

Not just to keep the secret anymore. He was asking whether I would stay by his side through this thing.

“I hope so,” I said.

“A ‘maybe.’” His chuckle rumbled the mattress. “That’s all I get?”

I wondered how much he could want. He already had me. What I needed was to peel myself a little bit away. Not too far, just enough to see who I was.

“That’s all that’s fair,” I said.

He patted my scalp. “Can’t ask for more, I guess. So when are you going to tell me who you are?”

“Once I figure it out for myself,” I whispered. Once I know.

I rose in time to get to the window and watch the sun bloom over the empty land. Just a few hours of sleep separated this day from the last. I’d come full circle since last week.

Only now, that little sleep was refreshing. And instead of medicating with whiskey, I had ridden myself to exhaustion on Katie. I turned for the dozenth time to make sure I really had her. That this wasn’t just another long dream.

She slumped peacefully under a tumble of sheets, rustling with each faint breath. My mouth lathered up just watching the dark points at the center move. This wasn’t a dream. No dream could be as perfect as those heavenly clouds.

Heavenly wasn’t exactly the right word for Katie. We’d been crazy together that first day. I’d worn myself out. I thought that at least, but last night, she’d woken me up with a little hand already slipping up and down my shaft. When I climbed into her, she had sighed, as if any time apart had been misery.

I had ridden her so many times after that. She’d started to open up more than her body. Between each session, she’d offered up a morsel of her mind. Her parents were dead, she said after the first time. After the second time, while we ate more burgers from the fast food place nearby, she told me I was her first. That had been mind-blowing. All that wait, just for me?

That little remark took us straight into our next tussle.

After that, she had just run her hand over my body and asked me about my ink. I had told her the names of my units in the army. About things between Wraiths and the Scorpions and then her hand wound up at my mid again. After we finished, we had slept. At least, for a couple hours. Until I woke with a sudden wetness on my crotch only to find her mouth wrapped around me.

My kind of heaven.

Strange how the right lack of sleep could leave a man refreshed. I was renewed in more than body. I had no doubts anymore. The Wraiths went or Katie did, and that was no choice. My mind flared red whenever I thought about the club. About Nico. I shouldn’t have let Trig off so easy when I had him in the dirt.

I locked up Katie nice and tight and went out for a jog. I stuck to the road, limited myself to 5 miles. I could do the 8, but when you were gearing up for war, you didn’t burn yourself out on the training. 

Especially not when you’d gotten plenty of exercise another way.

I came back across to our room with a steaming sack of sandwiches and coffee. Katie still nestled in her spot so I set the food aside and sipped the brew. I looked at the desert and schemed. The haze clouding my mind had lifted. Each sip brought parts online that had lain waste for years. Tactical positioning. Guerrila operations. Counter-surveillance. The full use of my enhancements.

I heard the shuffle of blankets. I waited. Small feet pattered across carpet and then delicate hands cupped my shoulders.

“Anything good out there?” she breathed. Her nipples sat hard against my back. I almost spun around and dragged her off to bed again. There would be time for that.

“Nothing good,” I said. “Just options.”

“Options?” She joined my side, completely nude, completely at ease. I brought her tighter to me.

“On how to take down the Wraiths.”

“You want to take them down now? Your own club? Your brothers?”

“I already said. They’re no brothers of mine. The Scorpions were just trying to get you to talk. My brothers tried to have you killed.”

She shrugged. “I 
am
 a witness.”

I looked down on her but her eyes looked out. “You’re saying it’s right to kill innocents.”

“I mean, not for me…but it’s not much worse than normal operations right? Drugs, guns, murder. They kind of go together.”

“They’re your real problem though. Not the police. Not even the Scorpions.”

“I don’t know. I just don’t want any death done on my behalf.”

Her body ran rich with the sunlight. She might not be an angel, but her little figure seemed otherworldly at my side. Some voice of conscience. A beacon of peace in my swirling oasis of rage.

“I know you want to go back," I said. "But if we do, then it may not be a happy ending for everyone.”

She processed the information carefully. “Ok. So what are our options?”

I sighed and turned back to the horizon. It went on forever it seemed, though I knew that I was seeing at most 5 miles ahead. After that would come another 5 miles, then 5 more of the same. This land was vast, but if we kept going it would spill over into another.

“We could just leave,” I said.

“You sure they wouldn’t come after us?”

“The clubs run local. No reason to chase us to LA or Denver or Houston.”

She turned to me. “The cops?”

“Small town case. I’ve got some cash. If we stay low for a few months, the whole thing will go cold. We’ll be free enough as long as we stay away for a good long while.”

She took this in and did that slow nod again. “Or maybe longer. I could sell the house from anywhere. I already talked to a guy about that a while back.”

“You could be a vet anywhere,” I said.

“I could apply to nursing school,” she said. “Well, after some filler coursework.”

I nodded as if that meant something. It had just been an idea but watching it work through her made me feel my mood sink. Sure it meant just her and me for a while, but what place did I have in the life of a girl like that?

She seemed to notice. “What about you?”

What about me? Who wouldn’t want a war machine with an odd chemical dependency. “I could find something.”

Another nod. Probably she knew I wasn’t worth a damn and didn’t want to press it.

I looked out another way. North, I figured. A few hours of chasing the horizon and we’d be back at Gilsner. The place that had birthed me and her - the only place that needed me anymore.

“We’re not leaving are we?” 

It came out as calm as the rest of her questions, but it still startled me. “We can leave. It’s fine by me.”

“You don’t want to go either.”

I tried to find a way inside me to leave the business I had started unfinished. To leave this mission that I had never asked for. I didn’t find the exit.

“I don’t.” The words came out like a confession.

She stood on her toes, brushed her lips into my ear and whispered.

“Good.”

I still saw him in my dreams sometimes. The man that changed my life.

He lurches out toward me in the darkness, a red smile on the new mouth that's been opened in his throat.

This is the man who brought those fiery blue eyes on me. The ones which now lay shut behind me, within that mass of muscle sleeping under the tussle of motel sheets.

I stood at the window, completely nude. Still chill and fresh from the condensed sweat we'd built up a half hour ago. Ghost had clutched me to him after, but he'd drifted off quickly. The first night we were shacked up here, he had told me to ‘watch my flank’ and ‘pull back’ in his dreams. Now he slept like a baby.

Thinking about that made me smile. But then I remembered the things he had said while fully awake last evening and the happiness fell from my lips.

The moon beat down on the desert floor. It wasn't very bright anymore. I should have never lived long enough to see it like this, I reminded myself. If I wanted to see it drop further, his plan was the best way.

It was the only choice we were willing to make.

I tried to repeat the thought in my head like a mantra. It derailed quickly, remembering instead his voice as he told me the plan. Rich and cold at the same time, like a caviar. Usually that voice ran warm down my spine, but not this time.

This time, it held a simple question: join his biker club or fight it? The edge was there to tell me that his body was mine to command for either task.

"No death." I said, remembering the sound of a man's last breaths.

“Fine,” he said. Then he added, "But I can't promise that."

What could I say? This was his world, and I had made the only choice before me.

This time tomorrow, I would be a member of the Desert Wraiths motorcycle club.

Or maybe I'd be dead.

Not before Ghost though. He might be at rest now but in action he was something beyond human. Literally, considering the modifications the army had made to him. If anyone even glanced at me the wrong way, he could drop them before they finished their thought.

The desert kicked up a cloud of dust. I wondered all of a sudden where out there that dead man was buried. If he would stay buried with the wind lashing down.

A heavy weight set upon me. My eyelids drooped. I'd worried myself to exhaustion. One of my few true talents.

I walked around to my side of the bed. Ghost had the side nearer the door - even in sleep, shielding me. I stroked the thick trunk of his leg through the sheets. Even with the night smothering my brain, even with tomorrow promising an uncertain end, of all that muffled muscle sparked a little fire. A fire, I realized, I wanted to keep burning.

It was a strange thing for me. Choosing to wade in deep instead of hiding from the water. I'd spent years in limbo, and in the end it wasn't seeing a man die that had gotten rid of it. Not truly. It had been the sight of those fiery blue eyes. Augmented by genetic tampering, designed for warfare, and still seeing nothing else in the world but me.

I snaked under the sheets and sank into the cloud of heat. This was not the life I wanted. To be part of a 1% club. To have to cover up a murder and hide from the law to save myself.