Dominant Predator

A Total-E-Bound Publication

www.total-e-bound.com

Dominant Predator

ISBN # 978-1-78184-458-8

©Copyright S.A. McAuley 2013

Cover Art by Posh Gosh ©Copyright August 2013

Edited by Eleanor Boyall

Total-E-Bound Publishing

This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Total-E-Bound Publishing.

Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Total-E-Bound Publishing. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.

The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.

Published in 2013 by Total-E-Bound Publishing, Think Tank, Ruston Way, Lincoln, LN6 7FL, United Kingdom.

Warning:

This book contains sexually explicit content which is only suitable for mature readers. This story has a
heat rating
of
Total-e-burning
and a
sexometer
of
2.

This story contains 137 pages, additionally there is also a
free excerpt
at the end of the book containing 13 pages.

The Borders War

DOMINANT PREDATOR

S.A. McAuley

Book two in the Borders War Series

A relationship is the least of Merq and Armise’s concerns…

With one bullet Merq Grayson set the wealthiest citizens of the world on a collision course with the poorest—with those fighting for their freedom. As the Borders War reignites, the Revolution faces heavy losses. They scramble to maintain their advantage, to strike at the Opposition and crumble their power structure before they are able to rally.

But Merq is in the midst of an internal battle that shakes him to the core. For the first time in his life Merq will have to reconcile the inherent tragedy of war and decide just how much vengeance can be justified by spilt blood. How much can he trust the men and women around him? The President, Neveed, his former soldiers, his parents…and Armise.

Merq and Armise find themselves off grid and on the hunt for Committee members. Merq is just as unsettled with Armise at his side as he was with Armise as an enemy, but they will have to learn how to fight together—or they may just die together.

Dedication

To my tumblr loves Layne, Esmee, T, and Val #you rock.

Trademarks Acknowledgement

The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmark mentioned in this work of fiction:

Colt: Colt’s Manufacturing Company LLC

Prologue

Year 2546

Belfast—United Union

It was a fool’s errand and I was going to get killed for it.

The sonicbullets whizzed around me, cutting way too close, and I went from being frustrated to pissed to furious in one heartbeat. There was no way I was losing my life in a mission that didn’t matter, let alone one that I never should have been sent on.

I was being actively tracked by United Union troops through the streets of Belfast. They’d begun converging on the former archives building as soon as they had heard there were Nationalist operatives in town seeking the infochip.

I’d been sent here to use the appearance of Nationalist spies as cover for our own search for the infochip. Armise’s government had had the same idea. Unfortunately, the UU guards didn’t care what country or cause we were affiliated with—they were shooting anyone not wearing the royal purple and black of a UU uniform. I was intent on making it out of the skirmish alive and completing my surveillance of the archives when I popped an underground access grate on the road, dropped into the tunnel and came face to face with Armise.

I lunged and swiped him across the face with my knife before he had a chance to retreat. The wound opened, seeped red and Armise’s body tensed, but he didn’t advance on me.

I hadn’t seen him since that first kiss, months ago in Singapore. And as soon as I saw him I could think of nothing else. Outside of the battle tactics and training stuffed into my head on a daily basis, I’d thought of little else but that kiss in the ensuing time.

Judging by the way Armise’s eyes openly surveyed my body, he was thinking the same things I was.

“Follow me,” he stated and moved past me without further preamble.

I looked above and down the tunnel then back to Armise’s form disappearing into the darkness and turned to catch up.

We tracked through a series of stone arches, our boots slapping in the standing shallow water below ground. Armise whispered one-word answers into his comm, adjusting his trajectory based on whatever information was being fed to him.

My guard was up, my pistol gripped in tight fingers, trained at Armise’s back. But of the two options—at the surface with more UU forces than I could take on myself, or underground with one man—this one gave me the highest chance of survival.

We came upon a metal door and Armise turned to me. “Fifty metres ahead there’s an abandoned storefront. Door to your left. We’re going to have to move quickly.”

With that he pushed the heavy door open, the motion littering the ground with a swirl of red dust when the ocean air swept inside.

I took off through the door, keeping low, scanning the area and listening for any indication of movement besides Armise and me. I caught sight of the building, skidded around the corner of the crumbling stone structure and pushed at the broken door, sliding inside as quietly as possible. I didn’t bother to look back to see if Armise was behind me. I hoped that maybe he wasn’t.

No such fucking luck, of course.

Armise was only a step behind me. He tried to bolt the door shut but the lock wouldn’t flip. The already distant sound of sonicpops receded farther. Likely moving in the opposite direction of us—towards the archives.

I had no other choice but to wait for the firefight to end before I could reassess my next move.

I holstered my pistol and slumped against the wall. Armise moved slowly, deliberately, his gaze never leaving mine as he took up a similar position on the floor across from me.

We stared at each other for an indeterminate amount of time. Neither of us speaking.

He was bleeding from the gash across his cheek that I’d given him—just one more instance of my speed overpowering his strength—and I noted the practiced move of his fingers as he unpacked a medkit from his uniform and proceeded to stitch, suture and dress the wound using only the reflection from a knife he balanced between his knees, the point digging into the thick black uniform.

I was wounded myself and I wasn’t sure when the UU soldiers had got close enough to inflict the cut running from above my right knee and around my thigh. The slash wasn’t deep—not enough to require stitches—but enough that it would hinder my movement. I could feel the warmth of the blood seeping into the fabric of my torn pants. A similar warmth spread down my back, but when I moved I didn’t register any pain.

We were trapped together in this dilapidated building and when the UU forces found us, as they eventually would, I didn’t even pretend to think we would be working together to get out of this alive.

“You have a transport chip?” Armise asked without looking up at me as he knotted the end of the suture. He sanitised the needle again then placed it back into the medkit, picked up his knife and with a flick of his wrist cut the dangling thread hanging on his cheek.

I flexed my hands and considered whether to answer him. Transport was still in its infancy—still more experiment than a normal mode of travel. There were reports of people never making it to the transport centres. Body parts turned out, misplaced, moved, rearranged. For those who made the trip successfully, the process was excruciating.

I hated travelling via transport. It was part superstition, part distrust of anything new—and mostly my survival instinct—keeping me from that platform. Both Jegs and Simion used it as their main form of transportation. In fact, Jegs had been one of the first volunteers when it first became available. She was always ready to take on the most dangerous assignments, the most insane of orders. She was a bit too eager for me. And her willingness told me more about her mental stability than I probably needed to know.

I, on the other hand, wasn’t going to voluntarily use something so categorically dangerous and unstable. As it stood, my job was risk. The imperfect science of formulating options and calculating the odds for success. I used the factors of my environment to make decisions and adjustments and to compensate for the unknown. But I had complete confidence in my own ability. I didn’t trust anyone else worth shit. Definitely not enough to be a lab rat for a government-sponsored project that, as I saw it, still teetered on failure.

I eyed Armise, but shook my head and answered him anyway. “No. You?”

He nodded. “I do, but it’s shit technology. I’d rather fight my way out. Better odds.”

Isn’t that exactly what I was just thinking?

I laughed.

This was fucking ludicrous.

The more I learned of him the more I realised just how much we had in common. How similar our upbringings had been. Our training. Our strategic approach and tactics. That I worked within the confines of a team and he worked exclusively solo was our biggest difference. I had to adapt to the dynamics of a group—conflicting personalities and opposing viewpoints—while Armise did whatever the fuck he wanted, whenever he wanted, to whomever he wanted.

“That hurt?” I asked, with only a hint of sarcasm, as I pointed to his face and the red angry slash down his left cheekbone, criss-crossed with black sutures.

“Yeah,” he answered honestly as he rested his head against the wall and watched me. I didn’t know how I knew it, but I could tell there was something he wanted to say but was contemplating whether to spit it out or not.

I didn’t break my gaze to him. It was a challenge for him to speak next. To give words to whatever it was that he was thinking but not saying. My thoughts strayed back to that kiss in Singapore. Memories of it weren’t far from my consciousness anytime, if I was being honest. I was intrigued by him.

He was the only other person in the world that I knew who did the same job I did. Black ops. Sniper. We were ghosts in our world. Harbingers of death.

While I worked with other Peacemakers, none were tasked with the level of secrecy I protected.

I wondered what Armise’s main objectives were. What his orders from the Premiere were. Or if the Premiere was even the one he reported to.

That we were both in Belfast meant that we were likely under similar orders.

Our governments had been chasing the infochip for over a decade now. It was the last known repository of the old knowledge. All paper records and books had been digitally replaced over two hundred years ago in a desperate conversion as the Nationalists had tried to destroy everything. Ultimately the Nationalists had succeeded anyway—wiping even the repositories clean decades later when they created targeted electromagnetic pulses by exploding nuclear bombs over the server banks on each continent. The only thing that had survived the purge was one rumoured infochip.