Claimed (7 page)

Alexander chuckled and moved to the kitchen to make coffee. Jean-Luc indicated that I should follow him to the study, holding out a brown paper bag to me. I snatched it from him and buried my face in the bag, inhaling deeply. I’d missed the
boulangeries
of Paris. San Francisco had plenty of excellent bakeries, but nobody did pastries like the French. “What’s up?” I asked him, munching at a croissant. I got the distinct sense that he wanted to talk to me alone.

“I just want to clear up a few loose threads,” he responded. “Did you go to the bar in Saint Denis looking for Alexander the night you killed Klimov?”

I shook my head. “That was coincidence, pure and simple.”

“Alexander would call it fate,” Jean-Luc said. He fixed me with a piercing look. “Be honest with me, Ellie. Bectell wants to kill Alexander. If it comes down to it, can you put a bullet into the heart of the man who trained you for five years?”

“I don’t know.” I met his eyes. “Do you want me to lie and tell you I’m happy about this? I’m not.” I exhaled. “But I didn’t kill Daniel Schneider, Jean-Luc. I don’t agree with what Lucien is doing. If it comes down to it, if it means keeping Alexander safe?” I gulped. “I can shoot.”  

Whatever I’d said, it had been the right thing. Jean-Luc nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. He didn’t quite smile at me, but he looked marginally less threatening.

That encouraged me to ask my next question. If Jean-Luc was in a talkative mood, I was going to take advantage. “How long have you known Alexander?”

“Since he was eighteen,” Jean-Luc replied. “He took a bullet for me once in Algiers. Almost died in the hospital.”

There was so much about Alexander I didn’t know. If I was to build something real with him, there was so much I needed to discover. Sex, as amazing as it was, wasn’t enough for a lasting relationship. “You said Alexander would call it fate. Does he believe in it?”

“I do,” Alexander’s voice interjected as he entered the study. “Fate and destiny and karma.” He shot me a meaningful look. “Though I like to help nudge things along.” He set the coffee pot on the table in the middle, along with three mugs.

“Like Sylvia?”

He nodded though he didn’t elaborate. “We need to make a plan,” he said. “Somehow, Bectell is able to stay one step ahead of us and I don’t like it.”

“Do you have a leak on your team?” It was the obvious question and someone had to ask it.

“No,” Alexander said immediately.

Jean-Luc however was slower to respond, and I turned to him with a searching look. “Alexander believes in people,” he replied. “It’s simultaneously his best and his most aggravating quality. The inner team is the three of us in this room, plus George, Katrina, Pavel and Luke.”

“Luke is the person who was shot in Hanoi, right? Who are George and Katrina and Pavel?”

“George is our tech guy,” Alexander replied. “Katrina and Pavel are bodyguards.”

“And can they be trusted?”

Alexander opened his mouth then closed it. His face bore a look of frustration. “The evidence suggests otherwise,” he said finally. “I hate that.”

He’d trusted me with the same innate faith that he was showing now, yet I wanted to punch him.
This is your life, you idiot,
I wanted to yell at him.
No one is automatically above suspicion.

Rather than screaming, I changed the topic. “Let’s talk about Lucien,” I said, my voice deliberately even. “What do you need to know?”

Jean-Luc looked at me. “You were closest to Bectell. What’s his operating style? How does he get information? Tell us everything you remember.”

Everything I remembered.
Such a loaded statement, though Jean-Luc didn’t know that, but Alexander did and he shot me a sympathetic look and reached out to hold my hand. My heart skipped a beat, but I forced myself to keep focused.
Lucien was out there somewhere, waiting to kill the man I loved. I couldn’t allow myself to get distracted.

“He’s a French soldier. Former spy, I think, though he doesn’t talk about his past much. Mostly, he preferred to work alone. Until I came along, I don’t think he ever had a partner.” It was only after I moved to San Francisco that I’d realized that I didn’t need to be as painfully isolated as Lucien had kept himself. I could have friends and dinner parties and beer tasting nights. It was so strange and so normal that after my first party, I’d curled up into a ball and I’d cried, shedding tear after grateful tear that something so trivial, yet so previously unthinkable was finally within my reach.

“How did you meet him?”

“He was after Dylan in Nigeria,” I repeated what I’d told Alexander last night, once again remembering that long-ago night when I’d huddled in a room on the way to Lagos, waiting for the men who had just purchased me from Dylan to rape me before locking me in a brothel for the rest of my useful life. “Dylan had just sold me to a whorehouse. Lucien rescued me and trained me to become an assassin. He helped me get my revenge.”

Jean-Luc nodded. I recognized the same intent focus on the mission that pushed human emotion to the background. I’d seen that expression before in Lucien. I’d worn that same look when I’d been after Dylan.

Things felt different now. I wanted more out of life than just the next mission. I wanted to build a future with the man next to me.

“Who gathered information for him? His background wasn’t in tech, was it?”

“No, he had a person. A woman.”

“Really?” Alexander leaned forward. “That’s odd.”

“Sexist,” I muttered under my breath.

Alexander chuckled at that, holding up his hands in defense. “That wasn’t what I said, Ellie,” he protested. “The vast majority of hackers are guys, that’s all.”

“Fair enough,” I conceded. “Her name is Mary, but I never knew her last name. Lucien had a bank account number for her that he wired money to.”

“Mary the hacker,” Jean-Luc munched at a pastry from the bag. “Did she ever email you anything? That might be a starting point.”

“I think so,” I replied doubtfully. “I really didn’t pay that much attention to the information-gathering portion of our missions.” I’d stumbled on a photo of Dylan on the internet shortly after I’d been freed and I’d had a major panic attack. After that, I’d avoided all forms of technology as much as I could, to my detriment.

That had been the reason Lucien had been able to lie to me about who Alexander was. Had I been more attentive, I would have realized the truth much sooner. “My laptop is upstairs, if you want to look through my email.”

“Okay, let’s call in George,” Alexander straightened. “He’ll need some time to play with it.”

I went upstairs to fetch it from Alexander’s bedroom. “It’s about time,” Jean-Luc grumbled as he took it. “Should have been last night.” He glared at the two of us. “I want you to be careful,” he said. “Alexander and Ellie, there’s a team of bodyguards in place. Until this is solved, you go nowhere without them. Understood?”

“Yes Sir,” I said dryly, then blushed beet-red as Alexander shot me an amused look. Oh, I was never going to live that down.

***

Alexander:

Jean-Luc left shortly afterwards, taking Ellie’s laptop with him. “I want it back,” she had told him. “It might be Christmas break, but I still need to study.”

“George will set you up with a duplicate,” he’d promised.

I looked at her once he left. “You are in college,” I said “I don’t even know what your major is. Want to catch up on our lives?”

She nodded. “Yes please,” she said. “There’s so much I don’t know about you either.”

I linked my fingers in hers. “Ask me anything,” I invited. “But first, we have something to take care of.” I made my tone stern and looked intently at Ellie. “Sir?” I asked her with a raised eyebrow. “How many men do you call
Sir
, Ellie?”

I suppressed a laugh at the look of chagrin on her face. “I was just being a smart ass,” she muttered.

“And being a smart ass, how has that served you in the past? Have you forgotten last night already?”

She winced. I knew she’d be feeling the effects of her spanking today. During the punishment, endorphins would rush in, converting the pain to pleasure. The next day, there was no such assistance. “No Sir,” she said. “I’m sorry?” she added hopefully.

This time, I just laughed. “Come on upstairs,” I told her. “You can tell me how sorry you are on your knees.”

Her eyes gleamed. “Oh good,” she said. She didn’t hide the note of eagerness in her voice. “You hardly ever let me suck your cock.”

“There’s a reason for that,” I said as we climbed the stairs. In response to her quizzical look, I elaborated. “I’m not sure if oral sex is a trigger for you.”

She squeezed my hand. “I appreciate the consideration,” she responded seriously. “I really do. It’s kind and thoughtful. It’s also not necessary, not anymore.” She shot me a challenging look. “Don’t hold back.”

My cock swelled in anticipation at the gleam in her eyes. “You can use your safe words,” I told her. “If you need to stop at any point, you always have that option.”

“I trust you,” she responded. “So trust me back. I know how to take care of myself.”

I had no doubt of that. She was a survivor, through and through. She was the strongest person I knew and as protective as I was towards her, it was largely unnecessary. She was more than capable of watching herself. I guided her into my bedroom with my hand in the small of her back and led her across the room, opening the door to the playroom and gesturing her through.

She gracefully sank to her knees the instant she entered the room. I could see a trace of a smile flit about on her lips. Brat. She was beautiful and perfectly submissive and she was smug about it. She made me want to laugh out aloud.

“Pleased with yourself?” I asked smoothly.

She chuckled, abashed. “Am I that obvious?” she asked ruefully.

I smiled at her. “I think I know you rather well,” I observed.

“You do,” she admitted. “I don’t think it’s working to my advantage right now. More punishment…” She injected a doleful note into her voice, an obviously fake doleful note. Her eyes shone and her nipples were erect and clearly visible underneath her shirt.

“Indeed,” I confirmed, winking at her. “More punishment.”

***

Ellie
:

It said something for the strength of the bond between us that I could joke about punishment. I could even speak words that would increase the number of spanks I received at his hands and I could do all of this knowing that I was never in any real danger. The instant my punishment crossed the line into something I wasn’t enjoying, I could ask for it to stop and it would end.

Once upon a time, I hadn’t believed that. In Madame Lorraine’s house, I had remained skeptical of the goodness of men. Then I had met Alexander and I had realized that the world was filled with far more goodness than evil. While Dylan had been a monster, thankfully for us all, true monsters were rare.

I’d fallen in love with the best of them all. A man who was, like me, a survivor. One who had fought his own difficult upbringing and had emerged, triumphant.

A man who, right now, cleared his throat pointedly.
Oops
. He’d noticed the daydreaming.

“Still more punishment?”

He suppressed a smile at the note of chagrin in my voice. “Indeed,” he said. “Now, since you are already on your knees, why don’t you crawl over to the spanking bench?”

I was still clothed but I refrained from mentioning it. Alexander noticed
everything
. I was fairly sure the fact that I was not naked had not escaped him. No doubt he had a plan in place to take care of that.

He did. He bent me over the bench, very much as he had done yesterday. But today, I was swiftly tied down, my wrists attached to the legs of the apparatus. My thighs were spread apart and my ankles were locked so I was open for him.

Of course, my head was at the perfect height to suck his cock.

I’d worn a skirt this morning. It had been one of the few items of clothing from my Bangkok wardrobe that still fit, possibly because the fabric had a generous amount of stretch in it. I hadn’t thought about how the garment would render me accessible to his talented fingers and tongue, but now, as I felt the skirt being raised, exposing my panty-clad ass to the air, I silently congratulated myself for my choice. Jeans would have made this situation a lot more complicated.

“Stop smirking, bright star,” he advised with a laugh in his voice. “Also, don’t move. I’m cutting off your panties.”

“Yes Sir,” I said meekly. He could read me entirely too well.

I felt the cold steel of the scissors against my skin. A couple of efficient snips, and the ruined panties fell to the floor.

“So beautiful,” he breathed, his hands gliding over my naked ass cheeks. His mouth followed and he nipped at my skin, while his fingers parted my labia. His growl of pleasure made me blush. I was,
predictably
, already wet for him. The instant his firm hands had taken my wrists and buckled them in place, my body had responded to his control, to his dominance.